Eric Adams is poised to be New York City's next mayor. Who is he?

NEW YORK – Eric Adams joined the New York Police Department because of the violence he experienced at the hands of its officers when he was a teenager.

The former police captain, who campaigned on a message of public safety and police reform, is poised to become New York City's next mayor.

"When you look at all the other mayors who have come up from where they came up from, there is no one like him. He is unique," said Sid Davidoff, a fixture in New York City politics and adviser to former Mayor John Lindsay.

Tuesday, Adams won the Democratic primary for mayor after results from the ranked choice voting election showed him holding on to a narrow lead over Kathryn Garcia, former sanitation department head.

He will face Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa, who founded subway crime-fighting group the Guardian Angels, in the general election in November. Adams is likely to cruise to victory in the city where Democrats far outnumber Republicans.

If elected, he would be the city's second Black mayor.

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'Face of the new Democratic Party': Adams' policing platform propels victory

The primary election focused heavily on crime and gun violence, as well as the city's recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Adams indicated he believes his run has national implications, calling himself the "face of the new Democratic Party" days after returns from election night last month showed him leading the race.

Adams' campaign rejected the "defund the police" movement, and he advocated for increasing police presence in high-crime neighborhoods.

He called for "civilianizing" parts of the department staffed by officers and advocated for more Black and brown officers to be hired. Adams said he plans to appoint the city’s first female police commissioner.

"He really has credibility on both sides of the issue," said Fordham University political science professor Bruce Berg.

Berg predicted Adams' success in his first term would largely depend on where the city is in its COVID-19 recovery in January. Addressing public safety will probably be his first test.

"If he can handle police reform early on, and make everybody reasonably happy ... I think that that would be a very successful first year for him," Berg said.

Davidoff said Adams would take on a role he has never faced before in his political career, handling the city's large budget and appointing heads of its vast bureaucracy.

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Eric Adams, from 'son of Brownsville' to state senator

Adams, 60, was born in Brooklyn and describes himself as a "son of Brownsville," which is a predominately Black neighborhood. He grew up in a working-class household in South Jamaica, Queens.

When he was 15, he was beaten while in police custody, he said, which sparked his desire to become a police officer and change the department from within.

“I was arrested, I was assaulted by police officers,” Adams told CBS on Wednesday morning. "I didn’t say, ‘Woe is me.’ I said, ‘Why not me.’ I became a police officer. I understand crime, and I also understand police abuse, and I know how we can turn around not only New York but America.”

In 1984, Adams joined the department and later served as the head of the Grand Council of Guardians, a Black officers' group. In 1995, he formed 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, an advocacy group that sought to fight racial profiling and police brutality while restoring trust among Black residents.

During the 1990s, Adams was briefly registered as a Republican. He left law enforcement in 2006 when he was elected to New York's state senate. He served as a senator until 2013.

A vegan, Adams said his plant-based diet helped boost his health after he was diagnosed with diabetes. He has a son in his 20s with a former girlfriend, and his partner, Tracey Collins, works in an administrative job in the city’s public school system.

Adams' career has not been without controversy. In 1993, he suggested that Puerto Rican-born politician Herman Badillo should have married a Latina instead of a white, Jewish woman. He complained about gentrifiers moving to New York last year during a Martin Luther King Jr. Day event, saying, “Go back to Iowa. You go back to Ohio.”

On the campaign trail, Adams faced criticism after a Politico report detailed discrepancies in his campaign and real estate records. Opponents accused him of misusing his government office building as a campaign office and actually living in New Jersey. Adams denied both allegations.

How Adams won: 'Outer borough' support and Democratic party politics

Adams serves as Brooklyn borough president. Although his office is more symbolic than it once was, Adams relied heavily on his base of support in predominately Black neighborhoods in the borough.

In other Black and Latino neighborhoods of the Bronx and Queens, Adams fared well. Garcia won much of Manhattan, with a larger share of wealthy and white voters. Candidate Maya Wiley, former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio who came in third and supported diverting funding from police, won largely in areas where younger, liberal voters have flocked in recent years.

Berg said some of Adams' success can be tied to the borough-based Democratic parties that threw their support behind him. Though those organizations "are slowly declining in strength over time, they're still the best thing around in terms of mobilizing votes," he said.

Adams' win was far from a landslide. He garnered about 30% of first-choice preferences under the new voting system that allowed voters to rank up to five candidates. In the final elimination round, he edged Garcia out by 1%, or 8,426 votes. Fewer than 1,000 ballots are outstanding, the Board of Elections said.

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For much of the race, Adams' main competition appeared to be entrepreneur Andrew Yang. The former 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful ranked in the top tier of much of the pre-election polling before the final campaign stretch, and he garnered heavy media attention. But a number of gaffes – from admitting to riding out the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic outside the city to whiffing on policy details – may have sunk Yang's chances.

In the final days of the race, Yang appeared alongside Garcia for campaign events to encourage voters to utilize in full the ranked choice voting system. Adams criticized the alliance, and his campaign surrogates tried to cast it as a form of disenfranchisement.

Though the campaigning may have given Garcia a boost – she jumped from third to second in the penultimate round of voting, knocking off Wiley after Yang was eliminated – it was not enough to defeat Adams.

Yang, Garcia and Wiley all conceded the race by Wednesday.

“New York is going to show America how to run cities,” Adams said Wednesday. "Because I know how to run this city. I know how to lead."

Contributing: The Associated Press

Follow USA TODAY's Ryan Miller on Twitter @RyanW_Miller

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Eric Adams election: Who is New York City's next likely mayor?