Rep. Val Demings, a contender to become Joe Biden’s running mate, said she believes racists should think long and hard about their career choices.
“You can be a racist if you want to. You just shouldn’t be in the police department. You shouldn’t be an educator. You shouldn’t decide who gets housing. You shouldn’t decide who gets jobs and wages,” Demings told ABC’s The View on Monday.
Demings, 63, is on the presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee’s understudy short list. The Florida Democrat was Orlando’s first female police chief before she was elected to Congress in 2016. She’s become a vocal criminal justice reform supporter after George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis as Trump seeks to make the general election about “law and order.”
Demings told The View on Monday that she didn’t think police were justified in using deadly force against Rayshard Brooks, a 27-year-old black man, who was shot and killed by an officer last weekend in Atlanta. The former social worker also backed Biden’s dismissal of activist calls to “defund the police.”
“Let’s appropriately fund communities as they should be,” she said.
Separately, Demings praised Biden for being “the adult in the room” for limiting his White House campaign during the COVID-19 pandemic. She defended the former vice president and 36-year Delaware senator’s quieter approach as the “safe and responsible way” to navigate the outbreak.
At the same time, Demings slammed Trump for scheduling a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, this Saturday. Attendees will be required to sign waivers agreeing not to sue the president’s team or the venue if they contract the virus.
The lawmaker’s hometown of Jacksonville, Florida, will now host Trump’s 2020 presidential nomination acceptance speech. Demings ripped local officials as well for proposing Jacksonville as an alternative to the original site of Charlotte, North Carolina.
“As we continue to see numbers go up in Florida, why on Earth would you push to have the convention here?” she asked. “The health, safety, and well-being of the American people is the president of the United States’s No. 1 responsibility, but obviously, he does not know that and does not understand that.”
