Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president and former police officer, was declared winner of the Democratic primary vote Tuesday night. Adams will face Republican Curtis Sliwa in the November general election in the heavily Democratic city.
While Adams, 60, has yet to offer detailed plans for the child welfare and juvenile justice systems, the longtime politician has frequently spoken about the importance of supporting foster youth, and the need to “strike the right balance between fighting crime and ending racial injustice in policing,” according to the Associated Press, which called the race.
“I grew up poor in Brooklyn & Queens. I wore a bulletproof vest to keep my neighbors safe. I served my community as a State Senator & Brooklyn Borough President. And I’m honored to be the Democratic nominee to be the Mayor of the city I’ve always called home,” Adams said in a Tuesday tweet, after updated vote counts showed him with a narrow but insurmountable lead over the second-place finisher, former city sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia.
Adams has been outspoken in his support for the Fair Futures program, which provides mentor-coaches to current and former New York City foster youth, and for expanding the city’s Summer Youth Employment Program, which is widely believed to help prevent juvenile crime.
Adams has also spoken out on the need to prevent youth from struggling whenever possible.
“We can’t continue to run our city downstream, where we’re only pulling out Black, brown and immigrant children and families. We have to go upstream and prevent them from falling into the river in the first place,” he said in June outside the former Spofford Juvenile Detention Center, where Adams was once held as a teenager. “We’re gonna continue to tear down the Spoffords symbolically throughout our city, and give our young people the opportunities they deserve.”
As a state senator, Adams co-sponsored one bill that opened a narrow window for family court judges to reverse a termination of parental rights in child abuse and neglect cases; former Gov. David Patterson signed that bill in 2010. A decade later, termination of parental rights has become a reform priority for New York City advocates working to correct racial inequities in the child welfare system.
In an interview Wednesday with Spectrum News, Adams appeared to begin broadening his message for the general election in November.
“The complexity of this amazing city is more than just being safe, what do you do after we’re safe? We have to grow our economy and make sure we attract new businesses here to the city,” he said. “Then we have to look at a real educational system. Sixty-five percent of Black and brown children never reach proficiency in this city. If you don’t educate you will incarcerate, and so we must have a real plan around education.”
He added that he wants to “go further” on early childhood education, building on the efforts of the outgoing mayor, Bill de Blasio (D).
The New York Times reported Wednesday that Adams has been “more iconoclast than institutionalist,” first as a “rebel police officer” on racial justice issues — co-founding the group 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care — then as a borough president who did not receive first-place endorsements from top congress members in his home borough of Brooklyn. Embracing his unique status as a vegan politician, Adams also published a book last year, “Healthy at Last: A Plant-Based Approach to Preventing and Reversing Diabetes and Other Chronic Illnesses.”
He has nonetheless received strong support from labor unions, including SSEU Local 371, which represents juvenile justice and child protection staff for the city’s Administration for Children’s Services. He was nominated in part by a diverse, working-class coalition of Black and Latino voters.
In addition to Garcia, Adams defeated former mayoral legal advisor Maya Wiley, who grew her progressive support throughout the race, and Andrew Yang, the former presidential candidate.
Adams’ general election opponent, Curtis Sliwa, a radio talk-show personality, founded the anti-crime group Guardian Angels four decades ago, during the high-crime 1980s. The unarmed group is known for patrolling the streets with red berets and jackets.
Adams would be the city’s second Black mayor, and his victory has been compared to the first — David Dinkins, a Democrat whom Adams described as a mentor on Wednesday.
Decades ago, Dinkins cancelled a planned prison barge, and instead funded an effort to provide more community services through schools, an effort led by the renowned Harlem Children’s Zone.