WASHINGTON — As U.S. Rep. Val Demings introduces herself to voters across the state of Florida, she’s making the conscious choice to use her old title rather than her current one.
In campaign materials and at events, the third-term Democrat bills herself as “Chief Demings,” an intentional decision to highlight her status as Orlando’s first female police chief above her current role as the city’s congressional representative.
Demings’ emphasis on her 27-year law enforcement career comes at a time when she’s vying with incumbent Republican Marco Rubio for the mantle of the law and order candidate in their race for Rubio’s Senate seat in the November election. She’s also been leading a push within the Democratic caucus to increase funding for police departments through federal grants.
“Our law enforcement officers are not safe — and I say that as a former law enforcement officer — when they do not have the resources that they need. How can we even begin to keep our families, our neighbors, and businesses safe around this country? I’ve attended more police officers’ funerals than I want to talk about today,” Demings said Wednesday in Washington.
Rubio, who announced endorsements from 55 Florida sheriffs last month, has made overt appeals to the law enforcement community. He has also sought to downplay Demings’ credentials on the issue and tie his likely Democratic opponent to the “Defund the Police” movement despite her background as a beat cop who rose up the ranks to chief.
“The reason why she’s always talking about herself as a former police chief and not as a member of Congress is because she’s been here for six years and she hasn’t done anything, literally not a single significant thing,” Rubio told The Miami Herald when asked about the role law enforcement would play in the race.
The two campaigns traded barbs on the issue on social media this week. Rubio’s campaign posted a statement from the senator contending that since arriving in Washington Demings has “made it harder for police to do their jobs while enabling violent criminals.”
Demings fired back on Twitter that as chief she reduced violent crime in Orlando by 40% “while Marco Rubio was home asleep in his bed.”
The exchange highlights how crucial the law enforcement issue could be as the two candidates approach their November showdown in a state that has steadily trended toward Republicans in recent elections. Rubio wants to frame Demings as a radical rather than a veteran police officer, while Demings must distinguish herself from the left wing of her party and maintain her centrist credentials amid national headlines about an uptick in crime.
Demings led an event on Capitol Hill Wednesday with five other House Democrats and officials from six national police organizations to promote a series of bills that would establish new federal grant programs for police departments.
The event constituted an overt rebuke of the “Defund the Police” movement and a clear effort to distance the Democratic Party from it.
“When we talk to communities, particularly those in some of the most high-crime areas, they will say, ‘No, we don’t want to defund the police, we want to fund the police. We don’t want to see less police. We want to see more police.’ Because they believe if we cut police resources, they become even more vulnerable,” Demings told reporters.
Demings’ call for more funding came the same week that freshman Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., told Axios that she would continue to use the slogan “Defund the Police,” despite requests from fellow Democrats to stop it. Bush, a member of a group of progressive lawmakers nicknamed “The Squad,” came into political prominence after helping organize protests after a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, fatally shot Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teen, in a 2014 incident that galvanized activists nationally.
Rep. Robin Kelly, D-Ill., one of the lawmakers who joined Demings Wednesday, told reporters that the lawmakers calling to defund police departments represented a small minority within the party. “You’re talking about what a few people think, but if you take a survey among the Democratic Congress members most people are not saying, ‘Defund the police,’ ” Kelly said.
The Wednesday event was put on by Demings’ office rather than her campaign, but the themes hewed closely to her message as a candidate as police advocates praised her leadership on the issue. .
“She knows how to protect the community because she’s done it. She’s worked the beat, worked every position up to chief. Ms. Demings knows that violent crime, homicides, shootings, are the deepest wounds in our community,” Fraternal Order of Police President Patrick Yoes said of the Florida lawmaker.
Demings’ call for more police funding aligns with President Joe Biden, who has advocated for increases in recent appearances, including this month in New York at an event with new Mayor Eric Adams, a former police officer.
But as Biden, Demings and other Democratic leaders embrace increased police budgets, Black Lives Matter activists in Florida worry that the issue of police reform and increased accountability could receive short shrift this election after gaining traction in recent years.
“I have noticed a lot of the pro-police rhetoric in the congressional race. It feels to be a competition of who can be the most not-socialist,” said Jasmen Rogers, one of the founders of the Black Lives Matter Alliance of Broward County. “It is discouraging to hear that Congresswoman Demings is sponsoring legislation that would increase these police budgets.”
Demings’ Violent Incident Clearance and Technological Investigative Methods Act, or VICTIM Act, would create a federal grant aimed at improving homicide clearance rates by enabling police departments to hire more detectives and upgrading investigative technology. She is also co-sponsoring a bill that would establish a grant for departments with fewer than 200 officers.
“Nearly half of America’s murders go unsolved. Is anyone really opposed to getting more murderers off of our streets?” Demings said Wednesday.
While Demings has called for more funding, she has also supported Democratic efforts for increased accountability. In 2020, Demings wrote a guest column in The Washington Post calling for a more proactive approach to police accountability following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis by Officer Derek Chauvin.
“My fellow brothers and sisters in blue, what the hell are you doing?” Demings asked in the column’s headline and first sentence.
She voted last year in favor of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which would restrict the use of choke holds by federal officers and would require state and local departments receiving federal funding to use body cameras. The bill would also restrict the use of qualified immunity, a legal precedent that currently shields police officers from being held personally liable in excessive force and other misconduct cases unless a plaintiff can show their clearly established constitutional or statutory rights were violated, a difficult bar to prevail in court. The bill passed the House, but fell short in the Senate after GOP opposition.
Lee County Sheriff Carmine Marceno, one of the sheriffs who endorsed Rubio, pointed to Demings’ support for changes to qualified immunity as one of the major reasons he’s backing the incumbent senator over the former police chief.
“When an officer takes action, reasonable action within the guidelines of law, to take away his qualified immunity is a really big deal,” Marceno said in a phone call in which he emphasized he still respected Demings’ law enforcement career.
Rubio’s campaign has sought to frame Demings’ push for increased funding as political opportunism motivated by her Senate run.
Demings removed “Chief” from her campaign logo in 2020 when she was under consideration to be Biden’s running mate, The New York Times reported at the time. She has revived its use as a Senate candidate.
It’s a point that her opponents are highlighting two years later. In a statement provided by the Rubio campaign, Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey called it “disturbing that Demings would pick and choose the times she adopts the title of ‘Chief’ based on when it’s politically helpful for her and not when it comes to standing up for law enforcement.”
Despite the criticism from Rubio’s allies, Demings is likely to continue to use her police background to frame issues.
During a visit with Cuban-American Democrats last month, Demings retold the harrowing story of being inside the Capitol last year during the Jan. 6 attack. She focused on one particular memory: looking down at her waist and realizing she didn’t have the gun belt she’d worn for nearly three decades.
“I couldn’t help but look down at my waist because for 27 years I had carried all of the equipment I would need in a situation like that, and I had nothing. And I looked down like, I cannot believe this,” she said during a Jan. 26 appearance at Finka Table & Tap in West Miami-Dade.
“You know why this former police chief was there? Who at that time had taken several oaths of office? Because I was there to watch the peaceful transfer of power. I saw it as my duty,” Demings said. “I’ve been in some pretty dark dangerous scary places, and I was in a place that should’ve been one of the safest places in our nation and I was crawling around on the floor.”
