| Val Demings Says ‘I Am The Police.’ Florida Sheriffs Say That’s Ridiculous. Collin Anderson Washington Free Beacon August 29, 2022 |
| Florida Democratic Senate nominee Val Demings says she can’t be criticized on crime because she is “the police.” Sunshine State sheriffs say that’s ridiculous. As a former Orlando police chief, Demings says she’s inherently immune to attacks from Florida’s law enforcement community: “I don’t just support the police. I am the police,” the Democrat said during an Aug. 17 interview. … Marion County sheriff Billy Woods told the Washington Free Beacon Demings “uses her title as chief to further her political agenda” but “certainly doesn’t use it to back law enforcement when she votes,” a move Woods called “shameful.” Brevard County sheriff Wayne Ivey, meanwhile, said Demings “took an oath to protect and serve, an oath she somehow forgot when she went to Washington and decided to vote with Nancy Pelosi 100 percent of the time.” And for Bradford County sheriff Gordon Smith, Demings has made clear during her “six years in Washington” that she “is no longer the police and didn’t have our backs when it counted most.” “As a law enforcement officer, I made a promise to my community to protect and serve,” Smith said. “Our representatives in Washington promise to support us in that mission, but Val Demings has failed to live up to that promise.” … Demings’s opponent, Republican senator Marco Rubio, has secured endorsements from 56 of Florida’s 66 sheriffs, as well as the state’s Fraternal Order of Police and Police Benevolent Association. … Demings refused to condemn the movement to defund police—in fact, she went as far as to defend the Minneapolis City Council the day after its far-left activist members pledged to “end policing as we know it” during a June 7 “DEFUND POLICE” rally in the city’s Powderhorn Park. The council and its anti-police activist allies, Demings said during a CBS interview, would “come out with a plan” for a new policing system that would “keep Minneapolis safe but also bring the community and the police together in a much needed and long overdue way.” Days later, the council voted unanimously to eliminate the Minneapolis Police Department. “Val Demings chose to play party politics instead of defending our men and women in blue,” Florida Fraternal Order of Police president Steve Zona told the Free Beacon. “Demings shouldn’t be going around saying she is the police when she hasn’t been for over a decade and has failed to represent the needs of law enforcement in Washington.” |
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