Eric Adams’ lead in New York City's Democratic mayoral primary race was a very slim one, the latest unofficial results from the Board of Elections showed.
As of Tuesday, the Brooklyn Borough President held less than a 1% lead over former Sanitation Department Commissioner Kathryn Garcia. That's about 7,000 votes ahead of Garcia's ranked choice voting numbers. The vote tally will be finalized next week but election officials say they have only 55 ballots to count.
Adams has already declared victory last week when he was leading by 8,426 votes and is likely to officially become the Democratic party's nominee for mayor next week. Meanwhile, Adams, Garcia and Maya Wiley have all filed lawsuits earlier this month seeking the right to review the ranked choice tally.
But finally, the race between the former police officer and Republican party primary winner Curtis Sliwa has begun to take shape with the two candidates both promising to be tough on crime. While overall crime has been down, the number of gun violence across the five boroughs has been rising.
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Sliwa, the head of the Guardian Angels, a nonprofit organization of unarmed crime prevention, wants to hire more police and criticized Adams Tuesday following his meeting on crime with President Joe Biden at the White House.
"The president of the United States has now said for a third time to New York City, please use it to hire police," Sliwa said, referring to Biden's recently announced new efforts to stop the violence, which included encouraging cities to invest some of their COVID-19 relief funds into policing and pushing alternative crime reduction steps.
Adams has a different plan for those federal funds than his Republican counterpart. In an appearance on ABC's "The View" Tuesday, the borough president said he would use the money to move officers from desk duty and deploy them to the streets.
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"I'm going to put in place plainclothes, anti-gun unit to do what's called precision policing to go after those known individuals who are carrying guns and using guns," Adams said.
Both a critic of policing and a supporter of police officers, Adams attempts to cover all the political bases. Adams, 60, is a moderate Democrat who opposed the “defund the police” movement but he's demanding police reform and community investment that prevent crime, while also making crime-fighting his top priority.
"[Crime] is going to destroy our economic recovery. We're going to lose our high-income earners because they don't feel safe. We're going to lose the multi-billion dollar industry of tourism because we're watching people shot in Times Square and we're going to lose it in our transit system aide," Adams said.
