Don Campbell/The Herald-Palladium via AP
A Memorial Day service in St. Joseph, Michigan, May 2019
As President Trump continues to grandstand on Twitter about “LAW AND ORDER”—the concept, not the television show—and Republican luminaries in the Senate daydream about military action against protesters, the GOP has abandoned any effort at getting in on the surge of public support for the Black Lives Matter movement and meaningful police reform, no matter the slogan. Democrats, meanwhile, are hoping to capitalize.
Forget their historic support for major police militarization legislation in 2014, and the 1994 crime bill that inaugurated this era of supercharged policing; Democrats are now the party of police reform. On Monday, House and Senate leadership introduced a police reform bill, the Justice in Policing Act of 2020, and then knelt on the floor of Emancipation Hall in the U.S. Capitol for 8 minutes and 46 seconds—the amount of time that it took Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin to choke George Floyd to death—while wearing matching kente cloth stoles.
Observers shuddered at what was received as an extremely cringeworthy theatrical display from Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Steny Hoyer, and others. But that performance actually telegraphed the contents of the bill adequately enough. It, too, is full of empty gestures.
Requiring body cams, ending chokeholds and racial profiling, and limiting qualified immunity may sound like a strong set of policies. And yet, Derek Chauvin was already wearing a body camera when he killed George Floyd, as a majority of police forces in the country already mandate. And in the past five years since body cams have proliferated, the number of people killed by police still hasn’t budged. Officers have adapted by conveniently turning cameras off at crucial moments. Meanwhile, the NYPD outlawed the chokehold in 1993, which didn’t stop them from killing Eric Garner, with a chokehold, in 2014.
Without actionable standards and strict financial penalties, “ending racial profiling” amounts to the implicit bias training that is already commonplace among America’s police, but has done little to deter the explicit bias that resulted in the deaths of Breonna Taylor, Floyd, and others. If these things worked, they would have worked already. And yet this is what Democrats plan to bring to the negotiating table with a Republican Party that cheered the arrival of the National Guard and unidentified Bureau of Prisons officers to intimidate a peaceful gathering in downtown Washington, D.C.
The problem for Democrats isn’t just that their bill is insipid. It’s that barely more than two years ago, they overwhelmingly supported the Protect and Serve Act of 2018, otherwise known as the federal “Blue Lives Matter” bill. That 2018 legislation called for anyone who knowingly causes serious bodily harm to a law enforcement officer to be charged with a federal crime and imprisoned up to ten years, along with even harsher penalties for other criminal acts against police. Kidnapping, threatening to kill, or killing an officer would be met with lengthier, enhanced sentences as well, including life in prison.
That bill, characterized as “unnecessary and pernicious” by Natasha Lennard in The Intercept, was brought to the floor by House Republicans as a pointed denunciation of the Black Lives Matter movement. And it passed the House easily, by a vote of 382 to 35. An astonishing 162 Democrats voted for it, including nearly every kente cloth–donning kneeler in the Capitol: Jerrold Nadler, Nancy Pelosi, and Steny Hoyer (who was actually the only Democrat to remain standing on Monday) all voted on its behalf. Only 24 Democrats managed to vote no.
Republican politicians have passed Blue Lives Matter bills at the state level all over the country, in Kentucky, Louisiana, and elsewhere. An astonishing 32 Blue Lives Matter bills were introduced in 14 states in the first three months of 2017 alone, largely brought by GOP politicians. Indeed, the House’s Blue Lives Matter bill was sponsored by four Republicans: Barbara Comstock of Virginia, Neal Dunn of Florida, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, and John Carter of Texas.
But one solitary Democrat also co-sponsored the bill: Val Demings, then a freshman congresswoman from Florida’s Tenth District, and the former police chief of Orlando. “After 27 years in law enforcement, I believe that officers must hold themselves to the highest standards, be accountable to their communities, and perform their duties with honor and integrity. There has been a 75 percent increase in officers shot and killed this year,” Demings announced in a press release showing her support for the bill.
Despite passing the House, the bill was not taken up in the Republican-majority Senate, and never passed into law. Of course, it immediately proved unnecessary on multiple counts anyway. “Blue lives” already matter most in the eyes of the criminal justice system; criminal penalties for violence against cops are categorically the most extreme of any class of victim. And policing is not even particularly dangerous: It routinely fails to crack the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ list of the ten most dangerous jobs in the country (you’re at far greater risk logging). At the admission of the Protect and Serve Act’s own summary, fatal violence against police had trended steadily down throughout the entire 21st century, arriving at an all-time modern low in 2013 (tracking the general decrease in violent crime). Despite a slight increase in 2016 and 2017, that trend has continued. According to the FBI, only 48 officers were killed as a result of criminal acts in 2019, a drop of eight from 2018. Ambush-style attacks plummeted to just two. Blue Lives Matter bills are not meant to serve a criminal justice purpose, just to send a message.
Greg Nash/Pool via AP
Rep. Val Demings (D-FL) asks questions during a House Judiciary Committee hearing on proposed changes to police practices and accountability, on Capitol Hill, June 10, 2020, in Washington.
Those simple facts, combined with the Republican Senate’s disinterest, didn’t dissuade Demings, who reintroduced the Blue Lives Matter bill again just a year ago, this time with Republican Congressman John Rutherford (FL-4), the former sheriff of Jacksonville. “Tragically, 22 officers were shot in ambush-style attacks nationwide,” Demings pointed out in 2018 in her renewed push. But only five of those officers were killed, down from a high of 21 in 2016, without the help of a federal deterrent. (And that number is not unanimously agreed upon; the FBI found only 17 such cases in 2016 in its own reporting.)
Demings’s commitment to Blue Lives Matter legislation might not be so noteworthy if not for recent reports that she finds herself on the short list of the Biden campaign as a vice-presidential option.
The murder of George Floyd and the newfound salience of police reform has shaken up the VP search. The prospects of Sen. Amy Klobuchar sank when reports of the Hennepin County Attorney Office's failure to have charges brought against Derek Chauvin for his role in the shooting death of Wayne Reyes in 2006 resurfaced (Klobuchar left the office in 2007, and her successor Mike Freeman later claimed the decision was his responsibility). Demings, meanwhile, has been rapidly gaining steam in insider circles as a viable option; an African American woman with a police background who has spoken out for reform. Her cameo as a House manager in the impeachment trial didn’t hurt, either. On Tuesday, Axios featured an interview with Demings where she pledged her willingness to accept the role if offered.
But a cursory examination of Demings’s record shows she would be even more indefensible a VP choice than Klobuchar. There’s ample evidence of Demings refusing to defrock or even investigate officers in the Orlando Police Department for use of brutal force during her time at the helm. An investigation by the Orlando Weekly in 2008 turned up rampant misconduct going unpunished in the department. In April 2007, for example, OPD officer Fernando Trinidad pushed a woman down the stairs at a nightclub, injuring her and then refusing to seek medical attention on her behalf, subsequently lying to supervisors about it and falsifying reports. After investigation, he was punished with the loss of two vacation days. Demings, then deputy chief, intervened: She cut that punishment in half, to one docked vacation day. The Orlando Weekly found that was “pretty harsh” by OPD’s standards.
According to the attorney of the woman assaulted, OPD was known as “an organized street gang with the authority to be street bullies.” Demings ran the unit from 2007 to 2011, presiding over an era where excessive force was commonplace and rarely punished. From 2010 to 2014, the department paid out damages for at least 47 lawsuits alleging false arrest, excessive force, or other misconduct. In January 2010, when an OPD officer was charged with an attack on a young mother and also named in an unrelated, 18-count civil lawsuit that alleged false arrest, assault, and battery, Demings responded by suspending him with pay (his pay was later halted). The Orlando Police Department “is a place where rogue cops operate with impunity, and there’s nothing anybody who finds himself at the wrong end of their short fuse can do about it,” wrote Orlando Weekly reporter Jeffrey C. Billman in 2008.
Already Democrats are at odds with activists and even popular opinion over how to address police brutality—Joe Biden has answered calls to “defund the police” with a pledge to increase federal funding for the COPS grant program for local police departments by $300 million and mandate body cameras, which, again, has already been proven not to work. (Biden did help write the 1994 crime bill that created the COPS program in the first place, let’s not forget; old habits die hard.) That’s well to the right of congressional Democrats’ readily maligned attempt. Adding a former police chief and Blue Lives Matter enthusiast to the ticket with an “architect of mass incarceration” would move the needle from inchoate to offensive.
“Blue lives” already matter most in the eyes of the criminal justice system; criminal penalties for violence against cops are categorically the most extreme of any class of victim.
Just by dint of managing a major urban police force, it’s likely that Demings oversaw even more brutality than is publicly known, information that could certainly emerge were she ultimately placed on the ticket. (That’s bad news for the growing school of Keisha Lance Bottoms enthusiasts in the Biden camp; she, too, as mayor of the large and segregated city of Atlanta, has overseen a police force that has engaged in the kind of behavior that has resulted in riots and protests in over 100 American cities during the past two weeks.)
It’s no secret that the Biden campaign is looking closely at black women in particular as it continues its search for an ideal VP candidate. The fact that it has Demings on an inside track position, as a former police chief and the biggest Blue Lives Matter zealot in the Democratic Party, underscores the profound challenges for the party in this moment. Of course, the notion that police reform would best be brought by a former police chief is animated by the same logic behind going to Larry Summers to enact meaningful banking reform in the wake of a financial crisis. Which is to say, it’s the backwards thinking that has long had a home in the Democratic Party, a more self-defeating version of Nixon going to China. But the party has been at best standoffish toward the Black Lives Matter movement throughout its existence, only pivoting in the past few weeks to chase this swing in public opinion. Appointing Demings would be a return to that long-standing norm, not a surprising tactical zag from the enduring champions of police accountability.
For Joe Biden, who now either must openly oppose the surging popular movement or be forced to repudiate his Clinton-era tough-on-crime bona fides that gave rise to the contemporary Democratic Party, the challenge is particularly severe. If Biden wants to signal his solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, overwhelmingly led by the young voters he struggles so profoundly to attract, he’ll have to capitulate either on policy or personnel. If it’s the latter, that means that former prosecutors and police chiefs will need to be cut from the VP short list. That doesn’t leave him with a lot of options. Clubhouse favorite Kamala Harris is a former prosecutor just like Amy Klobuchar, and Demings’s record speaks for itself. If black lives matter to Joe Biden’s Democratic Party, he’s going to have to find some way to actually prove it.
