From police chief to VP? Inside Val Demings’ unlikely path

ORLANDO, FLA. » Val Demings has already been vice president.

In 1972, the future Florida congresswoman was a young Black girl struggling to make friends at a predominantly white Jacksonville high school. She and her best friend, Vera Hartley, created the Charisma Club. Hartley was president and Demings was her second-in-command.

“We created an environment of inclusion,” Hartley said, recalling how she and Demings invited white students to join. Then “we were able to get into other clubs.”

Nearly four decades later, Demings is again being considered for vice president — this time by presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. As a Black woman with a background in policing who hails from America’s premier battleground state, Demings has honed the charisma she learned in high school to build a rapid national profile.

But she’s also facing scrutiny, particularly over her four years as Orlando’s police chief. While those credentials could blunt President Donald Trump’s argument that a Biden administration would lead to lawlessness, they could also spur unease among progressives who are leery of law enforcement, especially at a time of reckoning over systemic racism and policing.

“She’s out here touting a national plan” for criminal justice reform, said Mike Cantone, an Orlando liberal activist who previously supported Demings’ bid for Congress. “But she’s never once called for that kind of reform right here in her backyard.”

In a recent interview, Demings argued she used the tools available to her to address excessive force and bad actors on the police force.

“I think people don’t really fully understand sometimes the restraints that law enforcement executives have as it pertains to discipline,” she said.

She insisted she “found some creative ways to get around” those rules and developed her own way “to force officers who I believed should not have been law enforcement officers to resign, pending termination.”

In retrospect, Demings says, one of her biggest problems is that throughout her career, she’s not been the flashy or outspoken type, and didn’t speak up publicly about those efforts. Her parents, she said,

“taught me to be pretty humble.”

“If you use an ‘I’ too many times, it’s just not who I am.” she said. “I just tried my best to do what was right. I did what I could, when I could.”

OVERCOMING SEGREGATION

Demings speaks of her childhood with a cheeriness that belies the difficulties she faced as the youngest of seven, the daughter of a maid and a janitor and a descendant of slaves, growing up in a two-bedroom house in Jacksonville, a city known for its history of racial unrest.

In sixth grade, she was part of a group of Black students bused to a predominantly white school 15 miles from home as part of desegregation.

“Being the first Blacks to integrate Loretta Elementary School wasn’t always the best, most fun experience,” Demings said. “People remind you daily that you are different from the majority, and sometimes in a very cruel way.”

Demings recalled a time when she wanted to sleep over at a white friend’s house in sixth grade, and the girl’s mother refused.

“We don’t want that N- in our house,” the mother told her daughter, Demings said.