New York chooses ex-cop Eric Adams as favorite for Mayor

Eric Adamas, who became a policeman to fight against the racism he suffered when he was a young delinquent, is the great favorite to become the next mayor of New York.

It is very likely that this son of a poor Brooklyn family, affiliated with the Democratic Party, will succeed Bill de Blasio, also a Democrat, on January 1.

De Blasio is in the worst moments of popularity, despite the fact that he managed to lift the city of more than eight million inhabitants from the chaos in which the coronavirus pandemic plunged it, which left more than 34,000 dead in the Big Apple.

According to legend, the post of mayor of New York, which manages a budget of 98.7 billion dollars for the 2021-2022 fiscal year -the largest of a municipality in the United States-, is the second most difficult after that of the country’s president.

If the 61-year-old Democrat wins as the polls predict his Republican rival Curtis Sliwa, 67, will become the second black mayor to rule the economic and cultural capital of the United States, after David Dinkins (1990-93).

Some 5.5 million voters are called to the polls between 06:00 and 21:00. According to the electoral authority, about 170,000 people have already voted in advance between October 23 and 31.

The participation rate is generally quite low at local appointments.

Militia

In the last days of the campaign focused on insecurity, the likely future mayor debated twice on television with his Republican rival, a colorful character who always wears a red beret and who in 1979 created the “Guardian Angels” militia, patrols of benevolent people willing to fight against the aggressions in the streets together with the police.

Sliwa reproached Adams for not having met with the police unions, where there is greater resistance, along with the firefighters, to the mandatory nature of the covid-19 vaccine from among municipal officials, and having preferred to meet to talk about the fight against crime with former New York gang leaders.

And this despite the fact that this ex-police officer has promised to combat the crimes and crimes that soared in 2020, before going down again this year. Eric Adams presents himself as a determined leader, defender of the middle and popular classes, and a champion against racial discrimination.

Coming from the more traditional wing of the Democratic Party – contrary to the leftist representative of New York in Congress Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – she declares herself friendly with the businessmen of the Big Apple, the financial lung of the planet.

Like his predecessors, this recent vegan will lead the nation’s largest police force, the NYPD, with 36,000 employees, whose reform he has vowed to continue.

And it is that at the age of 15, when he was a young criminal beaten by the police, the mayoral candidate promised himself that he would do everything possible to “change the system from within”.

In the 1980s, he became a policeman, at a time of extreme violence in New York, and became a captain after 22 years in the force. In 1995, he founded a union to fight racism.

In a city that has paid a heavy toll for the pandemic, the future mayor will have to manage the return to normality of schools, offices and shops, as well as fight against social inequalities in the temple of capitalism, reform infrastructures in a dire state and cope with climatic risks.

After leaving the police force in 2006, he became a senator from New York State, and later president of Brooklyn, a springboard for mayor of New York.