The black former police chief tipped to be Joe Biden’s running mate

Some of those calling for Val Demings to be made Joe Biden’s running mate will direct you enthusiastically to a piece of video from last summer. It shows the Democratic congresswoman questioning special counsel Robert Mueller, when he testified before the House judiciary committee, about his investigation of Donald Trump. Demings, 63, is firm and sharp, but she is clearly aware of Mueller’s apparent physical decline and his frequent confusion. There is nothing to be gained, she appears to sense, by pressing too hard.

Rather she leaves him with an open-ended question – had the president’s “answers showed that he wasn’t always being truthful”?

“I would say generally,” Mueller agreed with a smile, delivering one of the key admissions Democrats had been seeking.

Others will tell you, with equal certainty, the video you most need to watch was from a decade earlier, in a different state, when Demings was literally wearing a different uniform.

In 2007, Demings, appointed that year to head the Orlando Police Department, the first woman chief in its then 132-year history, decided to start scrambling police radio messages. It was a controversial measure; the public and media liked to listen in and monitor police radio traffic, but Demings decided to cut such access for the safety of her officers.

At a public meeting, she makes clear she is not there to negotiate; the decision has already been taken. But she wants to discuss concerns people may have. “We have existed in this community for a long time together,” she tells the reporters. “We certainly aren’t going away and we know you’re not either.”

Kelly Cohen, a Florida lobbyist who once worked for Demings’ husband, may be among her most enthusiastic champions.

“Mr Biden would be incredibly wise to pick Val Demings as his VP. You know, as [the late NBC News journalist] Tim Russert used to say – ‘Florida, Florida, Florida’. And you know, Florida is a critical piece in the puzzle of winning an election,” she tells The Independent.

She says it is not just geography. Demings, as underscored by her performances in the House, is a tough and critical thinker, who may initially be intimidating to some. Yet, adds Cohen: “She’s truly a person of the people. She’s so warm, her laugh is tremendous… When you’re around her, there’s an aura, and she’s the kind of the person that connects with everyone.”

Those working to vet Biden’s potential running mates have no doubt watched the two clips, and many more. Contained in both are many of the qualities Demings’ supporters say she can bring to the ticket – decisiveness with a willingness to listen, moral clarity with an ability to engage. She is also an African American woman, who just happens to have lived and worked the entirety of her life in the battleground state of Florida, whose 29 electoral college votes are hotly chased by both Biden and Trump.

Yet, the 2007 video also underscores an issue the former vice president’s team will have to consider with care.

In any other election cycle, a black woman from Florida who served close to 30 years as a police officer might seem like an unbeatable resume for a Democratic running mate.

But this is no usual year. The death in police custody of George Floyd, an unarmed African American, and the national reckoning about race and the actions of the police against people of colour that has followed, would by some assessments make a career in law enforcement a clear disadvantage. For some progressives, Demings’ time as a cop would negatively outweigh the other, positive things she would bring to the ticket.

“There are some concerns from the progressive wing of the party because of her background in law enforcement, that hasn’t been scrutinised to a vice presidential degree, and because of this particular moment,” says Christina Greer, professor of political science at New York’s Fordham University.

“I don’t know, in the era of Black Lives Matter, if we want a former police chief, unless you have something really creative to say about policing. I think that would be the antithesis of what you are looking for in a candidate. It doesn’t matter that she is black, it doesn’t matter that she is a woman.”

Valdez Venita Butler was born in 1957, the youngest of seven children in a poor family in the city of Jacksonville. Her mother was a maid, and her father a janitor in the orange groves. She has said the family lived in a three-room home, and had only a wood-burning stove. There were shutters rather than proper windows. The family grew vegetables and raised chickens, and Demings attended a segregated elementary school.

“Our first house looked like Jed Clampett’s house in The Beverly Hillbillies television show,” a stepbrother, Benny Woods, told the Orlando Sentinel when she was appointed police chief.

At DuPont Junior High School, she was secretary of the so-called Charisma Club and a member of the athletics team. She had jobs at Dairy Queen and McDonald’s after school, and washed dishes at a nursing home. As a senior in high school, she won Miss Congeniality in a beauty pageant. In 1979, she enrolled at Florida State University and obtained a degree in criminology before joining the police force.

She met her husband, Jerry, also a police officer, while on patrol. He would go on to serve as chief of Orange County Sheriff’s Department, which includes parts of Orlando, the first African American to do so. He is currently Orange County’s mayor. The couple have three children. She is often photographed riding a Harley-Davidson. She is a regular at church.

Demings was elected to Florida’s 10th Congressional district in 2016, having failed in her first bid in 2012. (She dropped out of the race for Orange County mayor in 2014.) The 10th district, centred on Orlando, is bisected by the I-4 interstate, a 130-mile stretch of highway that has long consumed political scientists and journalists seeking an insight into the mood of the state.

Once in Congress, she quickly made an impression, and when Democrats retook the House in 2018, speaker Nancy Pelosi appointed her to both the judiciary and intelligence committees. She also asked her to serve as one of the party’s seven prosecutors of the Democrats’s impeachment efforts against Trump.

Since Biden let it be known in May she was being considered as a possible vice presidential candidate – “She is one of a group of close to a dozen really qualified and talented women who are on the list” – Demings has stressed her humble roots.

“It is absolutely an honour,” she told the local ABC television network. “And these are the kind of opportunities that I want [for] every boy and girl who are watching, no matter the colour of their skin or how much money they or their parents have or where they live in this country. They are supposed to live the American dream.”

And as protests erupted across the nation following Floyd’s death at the hands of police in Minneapolis, she has also not shied away from confronting her record, including four years as chief of the Orlando police department at a time when it faced allegations of misconduct.

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(WFTV reported that from 2010 to 2014, it paid out more than $3.3m in damages following at least 47 lawsuits alleging false arrest, excessive force, and other complaints.)

She told the Wall Street Journal she “chose tough jobs”. She has also pitched herself as somebody willing to reform the nation’s police system as Biden comes under mounting pressure to promise to “defund” and reform police departments across the nation if elected.

In an op-ed article published in the Washington Post on 29 May, four days after Floyd’s death, she wrote: “As a former woman in blue, let me begin with my brothers and sisters in blue: What in the hell are you doing?”

Whether she is selected will depend on what precisely the one-time VP is looking for. It is commonly held that presidential candidates often select a running mate in the hope that they can carry their own state, and there is no state more crucial than Florida.

More recently, some have questioned that assumption, pointing to the likes of John Edwards, unable to deliver his home state of North Carolina when he was John Kerry’s running mate in 2004.

Kyle Kopko, author with Christopher Devine, of Do Running Mates Matter?: The Influence of Vice Presidential Candidates in Presidential Elections, says data suggests a running mate rarely carries with them a geographic area the candidate would not otherwise have won.

But a person who is not seen as being able to step up and serve in the top job can damage the ticket, he says: “That’s probably where there could be the biggest electoral influence, by actually harming the ticket if someone appears unqualified.” He says one study suggested John McCain lost at least one million votes in 2008 after he succumbed to pressure from the right wing of the Republican Party to put Sarah Palin on the ticket.

Demings is a far cry from the one-time governor of Alaska. Politically, she is a centrist, her policy positions not dissimilar to those of Biden, and she is a member of the New Democrat Coalition.

Beth Rosenson, a political scientist at the University of Florida, says in normal times that would help her, but the mood of the party may be looking for someone more progressive, such as Georgia’s Stacey Abrams, a state legislator who in 2018 narrowly lost her bid to become the nation’s first black woman governor.

Rosenson points to the success this week of progressives, including Jamaal Bowman, in Democratic primaries in New York and Kentucky, as an indicator of the mood.

“She’s a very articulate woman and I think she’ll try to make the case. She’s certainly not just a cheerleader for police, but it’s going to be a difficult sell to the base of the party, particularly African Americans,” she says.

Cohen, who worked for Demings’ husband when he was running for mayor, says she will be able to make the case. She says she is not hiding away from her past, rather she is out front, admitting the nation needs to do better when it comes to the police, and other issues. Progressives need look no further than her handling of Trump’s impeachment.

“While they may not necessarily agree with her record as police chief, she’s got her progressive credentials as an impeachment manager for Trump,” she says. “She boldly called him out, and called out his actions.”