NEW YORK: Ex-cop Eric Adams, who fought racial discrimination within the police, was elected New York’s next mayor on Tuesday and will become just the second African American to lead the United States’s largest city.
He will take office in January, tasked with steering the metropolis’s economic recovery after the pandemic, which has killed more than 34,000 residents and closed hundreds of thousands of businesses.
Adams’s win caps a remarkable rise from his beginnings in poverty, which included running errands for a gang as a teenager before a beating by police officers spurred his determination to join the NYPD and reform it from the inside.
“Tonight I have accomplished my dream and with all my heart I’m going to remove the barriers that are preventing you from accomplishing yours,” the 61-year-old centrist Democrat told cheering supporters at his victory party in Brooklyn.