Deming's background as the Police Chief of a very problematic police department also doesn't exactly scream 'the time is perfect.'
The Orlando PD had a lot of issues similar to the Minneapolis PD. If people are banging (very unfairly I think) Harris (think that bullshit 'Kamala is a cop' meme, the one that the radical left was hard pushing) for her DA and AG past, well Demings actually was a cop, and the chief one in Orlando.
This will get attention, rightly or wrongly so.
She also was one of only a handful of Democrats to vote for the Trumpian anti-immigrant Kate's Law, which will not go down well with many in the Latinx community. She also was one of only 55 and 65 Democrats to vote for the renewal of the FISA Act and expansion that gives the government the ability to read your emails and IM's without a warrant. She voted for it again in 2019.
Finally, she has only been a House Representative for 3 and half, years, she has no other elective office experience, other than a losing House campaign in 2012.
Orlando Police Complaints in the Spotlight as African-American Ex-Chief Runs for Congress
Val Demings has unique appeal as an African-American former police chief running for Congress. But the department she ran has a history of excessive-force complaints now coming under scrutiny.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/orlando-police-complaints-in-the-spotlight-as-african-american-ex-chief-runs-for-congress/443526/
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First, though, she will have to navigate the complicated national dialogue on police brutality and criminal justice, a conversation that has changed dramatically since Democrats first tapped the tough-on-crime Demings as a candidate for higher office. When Demings first ran for Congress in 2012, discussion of her tenure leading the OPD tended to start and stop at one statistic: a 43.6 percent drop in violent crime from 2007 to 2011, according to FBI reports. But over the last year, a string of highly publicized shootings and violent arrests of African Americans by police has changed the criteria that voters and the media use to judge officeholders on law enforcement.
The growing focus on police misconduct highlights less agreeable aspects of Demings’s time helming the Orlando Police Department from 2007 to 2011. The department has a long record of excessive-force allegations, and a lack of transparency on the subject, dating back at least as far as Demings’s time as chief. From 2010 to 2014, the department paid out more than $3.3 million in damages following at least 47 lawsuits alleging false arrest, excessive force, and other complaints against the department’s officers, according to WFTV. (Records about these cases and other allegations of police misconduct in Orlando are not centrally housed or publicized, and some lawsuits are still outstanding.)
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Back in 2008, an Orlando Weekly expose described the Orlando Police Department as “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.” Demings responded defensively: “Looking for a negative story in a police department is like looking for a prayer at church,” she wrote in an Orlando Sentinel op-ed. “It won't take long to find one.”
In the same op-ed, Demings cast doubt on video evidence that conflicted with officers’ statements in excessive force cases, writing, “a few seconds (even of video) rarely capture the entire set of circumstances.” The excessive-force complaints continued throughout Demings’s tenure. In 2010, an officer flipped an 84-year-old man upside down and broke his neck after the man became belligerent. Demings initially said “the officer performed the technique within department guidelines,” but a federal jury later disagreed, awarding the victim $880,000 in damages.
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