Microsoft has ended access to its data centers for a unit of the Israeli military that helped power a massive surveillance operation against Palestinian civilians, according to a report by The Guardian. The company says that the country’s spy agency has violated its terms of service.
This surveillance system collected every day in Gaza and the West Bank. The massive trove of data has been stored via Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, but the company just informed Israel’s spy agency that this practice will no longer be acceptable.
Microsoft’s vice-chair and president, Brad Smith, alerted staff of the move in an email, writing that the company had “ceased and disabled a set of services to a unit within the Israel ministry of defense.” He went to suggest that this included cutting off access to cloud storage and some AI services.
“We do not provide technology to facilitate mass surveillance of civilians,” he continued. “We have applied this principle in every country around the world, and we have insisted on it repeatedly for more than two decades.”
Microsoft came to this decision after conducting an external inquiry to review the spy agency’s use of its Azure cloud platform. It also comes amid pressure from both employees and investors for the company to examine its relationship with Israel as it relates to the military offensive in Gaza.
This reportedly started back in 2021, when Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella allegedly okayed the storage effort personally after meeting with a commander from Israel’s elite military surveillance corps, Unit 8200. Nadella reportedly gave the country a customized and segregated area within the Azure platform to store these phone calls, all without knowledge or consent from Palestinians.
While conflict has existed between Israel and Palestinian groups for decades, these platforms were built out a full two years before the the most recent escalation in violence, beginning October 7, 2023. The mantra when building out the project was to record “a million calls an hour.”
Leaked Microsoft files suggested that the lion’s share of this data was being stored in Azure facilities in the Netherlands, but Israel allegedly moved it after Microsoft started its initial investigation. The Guardian has reported that Unit 8200 planned on transferring the data to the Amazon Web Services cloud platform. We have contacted Amazon to ask if it has accepted this gigantic trove of personal data.
VANCOUVER, Wash. — The City of Vancouver has identified a $43 million dollar biennial budget shortfall. In response, the city has announced a community survey. They plan on calling citizens throughout the summer to try and get as many opinions as possible about the best ways to deal with the shortfall. The city is hoping people will answer their phones when they call and participate.
Meanwhile, The City of Vancouver is also entertaining some new, potential revenue sources. One is a commercial parking tax, another is a retail tax. And a tax on media streaming is also being considered. That tax has never really been levied and collected before by any major U.S. city.
Vancouver city officials will continue to work with the realities of the budget shortfall in front of them to try and keep the number of cuts to city services to a minimum.
Across the internet, a biological scapegoat has emerged for almost any mysterious medical symptom affecting women. Struggling with chronic fatigue, hair loss, brain fog, or dwindling sex drive? When no obvious explanation is at hand, an out-of-whack endocrine system must be to blame. Women have too much cortisol, vloggers and influencers say; or not enough thyroxine, or the wrong ratio of progesterone to estradiol. Social media is brimming with advice from self-proclaimed hormone “gurus” and health coaches; the tag #hormoneimbalance has racked up a staggering 950 million views on TikTok alone.
Now dozens of start-ups promise to diagnose these imbalances from the comfort of your home. All it takes is the prick of a finger, a urine sample, or a vial of spit. You mail your sample out to a lab or run the test right in your kitchen, no co-pay or doctor visit required. A few days later, you receive a slick lab report and in some cases, a customized treatment plan to alleviate the depression, the insomnia, the feeling of just being off.
Hormone imbalances can indeed contribute to an array of mental and physical symptoms, and hormone testing overseen by providers is a routine practice in medicine. Doing so remotely could theoretically improve women’s health and access to care. But despite their growing popularity and Amazon-like convenience, at-home hormone tests might cause more problems than they solve. Several women’s-health and hormone specialists told me that remote testing has long been useful for detecting pregnancy and tracking ovulation, but that few, if any, products now for sale have been consistently and rigorously proven to work for broader, newly advertised purposes. Testing kits are marketed as a way of helping women decipher puzzling symptoms or assess their fertility. But experts said that the technology—at least as it stands right now—is unreliable and could have the opposite effect, causing anxiety and confusion instead.
Mindy Christianson, an ob-gyn and the medical director of the Johns Hopkins Fertility Center, told me that in the best-case scenario, an accurate home hormone test would lead its users to seek out necessary medical care for real medical problems. That’s what happened to Chrissy Rice, a 38-year-old in Georgia. From 2018 to 2022, Rice experienced a racing heart, panic attacks, skin rashes, fatigue, and stomach pain—but her blood work and cardiac tests kept coming back normal. Her doctor chalked her symptoms up to anxiety and prescribed an anxiolytic medication. Rice wasn’t satisfied, so she skipped the meds and ordered a $249 women’s-health-testing kit from a company called Everlywell. The kit, which uses saliva and finger-prick sampling, claims to check for abnormal hormone levels that may be keeping women from “feeling their best.” When Rice’s results lit up with four abnormal readings, she was “honestly relieved,” she told me: It gave her confidence that her symptoms hadn’t all been in her head. When she brought the results to another provider, he ordered more tests and eventually diagnosed her with an autoimmune condition called Hashimoto’s, for which she’s since been treated.
Rice’s success story relied on a lot of things going right: The test correctly flagged that something about Rice’s body chemistry had gone awry. (In this case, #hormoneimbalance really did apply.) In response, Rice used her results to advocate for appropriate care from a trusted health provider. But not everyone is so lucky.
Tests like the one Rice took rely on processes that have not yet been rigorously validated in clinical trials. Where traditional hormone testing involves in-person blood draws followed by a highly sensitive and specific process called liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry, home tests typically use dried urine, dried blood, or saliva sampling and a variety of techniques for measuring what’s in those samples. Women have, of course, been peeing on pregnancy-testing sticks since the 1980s. But these tests work well because the target hormone is present at relatively high levels, and should be found only during pregnancy. By contrast, hormones such as estradiol, testosterone, and progesterone—which are commonly targeted by this new wave of start-ups’ tests—regularly circulate throughout the body during various stages of a woman’s life, and are far trickier to measure using the low-volume samples involved in dried urine, dried blood, and saliva tests.
A handful of small studies from the past three decades (many of which are funded by direct-to-consumer testing companies or conducted by their employees) suggest that these methods may be accurate. Jennifer Conti, an ob-gyn physician and professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine who advises the home-hormone-testing start-up Modern Fertility, told me that the company’s internal data, especially a study published in the peer-reviewed journal Obstetrics & Gynecology in 2019, convinced her that its technology was useful for consumers who want to make more informed family-planning decisions. “But this idea that at-home testing is a godsend is not true,” Conti said. “It’s something that can be very helpful right now for a certain population of people to open the door and start a conversation.”
Other experts still aren’t confident that the tests are worthwhile. I asked Andrea Dunaif, a professor and specialist in endocrinology and women’s health at Mount Sinai, and Hershel Raff, an endocrinology and molecular-medicine expert at the Medical College of Wisconsin, to review the 2019 study. According to the study’s authors, their findings suggest that Modern Fertility’s finger-stick testing methods can be used interchangeably with traditional blood draws to measure fertility-related hormones. But Dunaif and Raff pointed out a laundry list of methodological issues that they argue limit the power of the findings: The type of assay used isn’t accurate for determining testosterone or estradiol levels in women. Researchers didn’t use appropriate hormone-level ranges to test accuracy. Samples were analyzed within 48 hours—a timeline that doesn’t match up with real-world shipping. (Current leadership and members of Modern Fertility’s clinical-research team declined multiple requests for comment. But Erin Burke, a clinical researcher who co-authored the study and is no longer working for Modern Fertility, said she stands by the data. She told me that the team’s work shows that these testing methods are accurate and precise.)
Although many experts see minimal data to support their use, at-home tests can still be sold on account of a regulatory loophole: The FDA does not typically review what it calls “low risk general wellness” products before they hit the market. Some endocrinologists advise looking for home hormone tests with a certification from the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments program (which is legally required for every direct-to-consumer testing company) or the College of American Pathologists, both of which ensure that a company’s labs maintain certain quality standards and undergo regular inspections. But Dunaif told me the certifications don’t guarantee precise results. She would never recommend that consumers use a currently available product for testing women’s sex steroid hormones remotely, she said, arguing that people will waste money and likely get information that is either “falsely reassuring or falsely distressing.” (Dunaif recently consulted for Quest Diagnostics, a large clinical-lab chain that doesn’t offer home hormone tests.)
Charlotte, a New Jersey woman in her mid-30s, experienced the muddle of uncertain results firsthand. (I’m identifying her by only her first name to protect her medical privacy.) In 2021, Charlotte ordered a hormone panel from Modern Fertility after she began experiencing irregular periods. Her results showed an abnormally high level of prolactin, a hormone involved in ovulation and lactation, which made her think she might be infertile. Charlotte spent days scouring the internet for information while she waited to discuss the results with her doctor. When she finally showed her ob-gyn the Modern Fertility report, the doctor was incredulous. She basically dismissed the at-home results out of hand, and instead put Charlotte on progesterone. A few months later, Charlotte got pregnant.
Like Rice’s home test, Charlotte’s helped her start a conversation with a trusted health-care provider and develop a plan. But Charlotte told me that the process wasn’t worth the panic-filled waiting game and desperate Googling. She wishes she’d skipped the home test and consulted her doctor first.
Even when home hormone tests are accurate, their results are not diagnostic on their own. Drawing a straight line from hormone levels to a diagnosis is impossible without a medical history or physical exam; a user can’t predict her chances of pregnancy, for example, solely based on measurements of her fertility-related hormones. Nor would low levels of, say, estradiol or progesterone be enough to indicate endometriosis. Most people’s symptoms aren’t tied directly to a hormone imbalance, says Stephanie Faubion, the director of the Mayo Clinic Center for Women’s Health and the medical director of the North American Menopause Society. The more than 50 chemical messengers that coordinate all kinds of processes, including metabolism, reproduction, and mood, are constantly fluctuating and difficult to measure with a quick-hit hormone test, Faubion told me; people’s symptoms may be attributable to multiple interrelated factors. “Just checking a hormone level and saying Here’s your problem doesn’t serve women well,” she said. “It’s oversimplifying an issue.”
Some companies offer physician-reviewed reports, chat services, or phone calls with health providers to clarify any confusion. But Mary Jane Minkin, a gynecologist, menopause expert, and clinical professor at Yale School of Medicine, told me that those services might not be enough to curb misinterpretation, especially if test results aren’t reliable. Minkin worried that users may make drastic lifestyle changes or take off-the-shelf supplements. Christianson, of the Johns Hopkins Fertility Center, said that a growing number of her patients visit her clinic believing they are infertile or in premature menopause based on abnormal readings, when it’s not true. Others are rushing to freeze their eggs unnecessarily. And Faubion worries that providers, too, might use tests that aren’t evidence-based to make decisions about hormone therapy for patients. Some testing start-ups already offer personalized treatment plans and bioidentical hormone-replacement therapy via telehealth based on a user’s results.
Other experts had the opposite concern: that women whose home-test results appear normal would miss out on crucial interventions. Christianson told me that she’s seen men skip out on necessary infertility evaluations based on at-home semen tests. Women could end up making similar mistakes. And Dunaif said that women experiencing chronically irregular periods might be falsely reassured by a home hormone test and delay needed treatment for endocrine disorders or polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS).
At-home-hormone-testing companies aim to solve a pressing demand for clarity and control as women address their medical needs. If women have been tempted to blame their hormones for anything that’s wrong, that’s at least partly because they aren’t receiving sufficient guidance from doctors. For decades, female patients have been dismissed, misdiagnosed, and mistreated by their health providers more than male patients have. Far less clinical research has been conducted on women than men, which can make health care a guessing game. A diagnosis for a hormone disorder such as PCOS or endometriosis typically takes consultations with several doctors across two to 10 years. Plus, traditional hormone testing can be expensive, and specialists are difficult to find. Only 1,700 reproductive endocrinologists and 2,000 menopause specialists practice in the United States; fertility clinics are rare outside cities.
In an ideal world, women wouldn’t feel the need to circumvent their doctors to test their hormones at home. But as it stands, many are desperate for answers, and direct-to-consumer testing companies are responding to their frustrations. Someday, the tests might help point users to the appropriate specialist, provide useful information for women in medical deserts, or enable people to better monitor chronic conditions for which the relevant hormones are simple to measure. But until they are rigorously evaluated, women are left with imperfect choices.
Stephen B. Thomas, the director of the Center for Health Equity at the University of Maryland, considers himself an eternal optimist. When he reflects on the devastating pandemic that has been raging for the past three years, he chooses to focus less on what the world has lost and more on what it has gained: potent antiviral drugs, powerful vaccines, and, most important, unprecedented collaborations among clinicians, academics, and community leaders that helped get those lifesaving resources to many of the people who needed them most. But when Thomas, whose efforts during the pandemic helped transform more than 1,000 Black barbershops and salons into COVID-vaccine clinics, looks ahead to the next few months, he worries that momentum will start to fizzle out—or, even worse, that it will go into reverse.
This week, the Biden administration announced that it would allow the public-health-emergency declaration over COVID-19 to expire in May—a transition that’s expected to put shots, treatments, tests, and other types of care more out of reach of millions of Americans, especially those who are uninsured. The move has been a long time coming, but for community leaders such as Thomas, whose vaccine-outreach project, Shots at the Shop, has depended on emergency funds and White House support, the transition could mean the imperilment of a local infrastructure that he and his colleagues have been building for years. It shouldn’t have been inevitable, he told me, that community vaccination efforts would end up on the chopping block. “A silver lining of the pandemic was the realization that hyperlocal strategies work,” he said. “Now we’re seeing the erosion of that.”
I called Thomas this week to discuss how the emergency declaration allowed his team to mobilize resources for outreach efforts—and what may happen in the coming months as the nation attempts to pivot back to normalcy.
Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Katherine J. Wu: Tell me about the genesis of Shots at the Shop.
Stephen B. Thomas: We started our work with barbershops and beauty salons in 2014. It’s called HAIR: Health Advocates In-Reach and Research. Our focus was on colorectal-cancer screening. We brought medical professionals—gastroenterologists and others—into the shop, recognizing that Black people in particular were dying from colon cancer at rates that were just unacceptable but were potentially preventable with early diagnosis and appropriate screening.
Now, if I can talk to you about colonoscopy, I could probably talk to you about anything. In 2019, we held a national health conference for barbers and stylists. They all came from around the country to talk about different areas of health and chronic disease: prostate cancer, breast cancer, others. We brought them all together to talk about how we can address health disparities and get more agency and visibility to this new frontline workforce.
When the pandemic hit, all the plans that came out of the national conference were on hold. But we continued our efforts in the barbershops. We started a Zoom town hall. And we started seeing misinformation and disinformation about the pandemic being disseminated in our shops, and there were no countermeasures.
We got picked up on the national media, and then we got the endorsement of the White House. And that’s when we launched Shots at the Shop. We had 1,000 shops signed up in I’d say less than 90 days.
Wu: Why do you think Shots at the Shop was so successful? What was the network doing differently from other vaccine-outreach efforts that spoke directly to Black and brown communities?
Thomas: If you came to any of our clinics, it didn’t feel like you were coming into a clinic or a hospital. It felt like you were coming to a family reunion. We had a DJ spinning music. We had catered food. We had a festive environment. Some people showed up hesitant, and some of them left hesitant but fascinated. We didn’t have to change their worldview. But we treated them with dignity and respect. We weren’t telling them they’re stupid and don’t understand science.
And the model worked. It worked so well that even the health professionals were extremely pleased, because now all they had to do was show up with the vaccine, and the arms were ready for needles.
The barbers and stylists saw themselves as doing health-related things anyway. They had always seen themselves as doing more than just cutting hair. No self-respecting Black barber is going to say, “We’ll get you in and out in 10 minutes.” It doesn’t matter how much hair you have: You’re gonna be in there for half a day.
Wu: How big of a difference do you think your network’s outreach efforts made in narrowing the racial gaps in COVID vaccination?
Thomas: Attribution is always difficult, and success has many mothers. So I will say this to you: I have no doubt that we made a huge difference. With a disease like COVID, you can’t afford to have any pocket unprotected, and we were vaccinating people who would otherwise have never been vaccinated. We were dealing with people at the “hell no” wall.
We were also vaccinating people who were homeless. They were treated with dignity and respect. At some of our shops, we did a coat drive and a shoe drive. And we had dentists providing us with oral-health supplies: toothbrush, floss, paste, and other things. It made a huge difference. When you meet people where they are, you’ve got to meet all their needs.
Wu: How big of a difference did the emergency declaration, and the freeing-up of resources, tools, and funds, make for your team’s outreach efforts?
Thomas: Even with all the work I’ve been doing in the barber shop since 2014, the pandemic got us our first grant from the state. Money flowed. We had resources to go beyond the typical mechanisms. I was able to secure thousands of KN95 masks and distribute them to shops. Same thing with rapid tests. We even sent them Corsi-Rosenthal boxes, a DIY filtration system to clean up indoor air.
Without the emergency declaration, we would still be in the desert screaming for help. The emergency declaration made it possible to get resources through nontraditional channels, and we were doing things that the other systems—the hospital system, the local health department—couldn’t do. We extended their reach to populations that have historically been underserved and distrustful.
Wu: The public-health-emergency declaration hasn’t yet expired. What signs of trouble are you seeing right now?
Thomas: The bridge between the barbershops and the clinical side has been shut down in almost all places, including here in Maryland. I go to the shop and they say to me, “Dr. T, when are we going to have the boosters here?” Then I call my clinical partners, who deliver the shots. Some won’t even answer my phone calls. And when they do, they say, “Oh, we don’t do pop-ups anymore. We don’t do community-outreach clinics anymore, because the grant money’s gone. The staff we hired during the pandemic, they use the pandemic funding—they’re gone.” But people are here; they want the booster. And my clinical partners say, “Send them down to a pharmacy.” Nobody wants to go to a pharmacy.
You can’t see me, so you can’t see the smoke still coming out of my ears. But it hurts. We got them to trust. If you abandon the community now, it will simply reinforce the idea that they don’t matter.
Wu: What is the response to this from the communities you’re talking to?
Thomas: It’s “I told you so, they didn’t care about us. I told you, they would leave us with all these other underlying conditions.” You know, it shouldn’t take a pandemic to build trust. But if we lose it now, it will be very, very difficult to build back.
We built a bridge. It worked. Why would you dismantle it? Because that’s exactly what’s happening right now. The very infrastructure we created to close the racial gaps in vaccine acceptance is being dismantled. It’s totally unacceptable.
Wu: The emergency declaration was always going to end at some point. Did it have to play out like this?
Thomas: I don’t think so. If you talk to the hospital administrators, they’ll tell you the emergency declaration and the money allowed them to add outreach. And when the money went away, they went back to business as usual. Even though the outreach proved you could actually do a better job. And the misinformation and the disinformation campaign hasn’t stopped. Why would you go back to what doesn’t work?
Wu: What is your team planning for the short and long term, with limited resources?
Thomas: As long as Shots at the Shop can connect clinical partners to access vaccines, we will definitely keep that going.
Nobody wants to go back to normal. So many of our barbers and stylists feel like they’re on their own. I’m doing my best to supply them with KN95 masks and rapid tests. We have kept the conversation going on our every-other-week Zoom town hall. We just launched a podcast. We put out some of our stories in the form of a graphic novel, The Barbershop Storybook. And we’re trying to launch a national association for barbers and stylists, called Barbers and Stylists United for Health.
The pandemic resulted in a mobilization of innovation, a recognition of the intelligence at the community level, the recognition that you need to culturally tailor your strategy. We need to keep those relationships intact. Because this is not the last time we’re going to see a pandemic even in our lifetime. I’m doing my best to knock on doors to continue to put our proposals out there. Hopefully, people will realize that reaching Black and Hispanic communities is worth sustaining.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
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On a hot D.C. Wednesday in the middle of July, an 11-foot statue honoring Mary McLeod Bethune—carved out of marble extracted from the same Tuscan quarry that Michelangelo used for his David—stood draped in a black cloak in the U.S. Capitol’s National Statuary Hall. A group of distinguished guests had gathered to honor Bethune, the prominent educator and civil-rights activist who founded a college for Black students in Daytona Beach, Florida, and later served as an adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. She is now the first Black American to have a state statue in the hall.
The group, which included several members of Florida’s congressional delegation, smiled as cameras flashed. Two of those present, Senator Marco Rubio and Representative Val Demings, are opponents in the race for Rubio’s Senate seat—a race that could secure the Democrats’ control of the Senate. Together, they tugged at the sheet, revealing the white-marble figure clothed in academic regalia, holding a black rose—which, in life, Bethune viewed as a symbol of diversity.
One by one, speakers approached a lectern in front of the statue to offer remarks. “I remember as a little girl listening to my mother and my father talk about a Black woman, a woman who looked like us, who started a college,” Demings told those who had gathered in the amphitheater. “As I listened to my parents tell the story, it seemed impossible. But Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune made what seemed impossible possible.”
Demings hopes to conjure some of Bethune’s magic. The race has for some time been considered a long shot for the 65-year-old former Orlando police chief; to win she’ll need to make what seems impossible possible in a state where the voter rolls have flipped from a more-than-100,000-voter Democratic advantage in 2020 to a Republican lead of nearly the same size in less than two years. And for months the polls reflected that, showing Demings trailing Rubio; but in recent weeks, a new batch of polls has shown Demings pulling into an effective tie, or even a slight lead.
If the race does break her way, the Democrats will have the convergence of two separate story lines to thank. The first is the story of Val Demings herself: a centrist Black woman with a background in law enforcement—just the profile the party has placed its bets on in recent years. It’s no coincidence, after all, that Demings joined then-Senator Kamala Harris and former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, who both worked as prosecutors before seeking elected office, on Joe Biden’s shortlist for his running mate two years ago.
Political moderates could admire her centrism; people of color could identify with her race; women could identify with her gender. Demings has converted that appeal into a fundraising advantage, pulling in millions more in donations than Rubio so far this cycle, and spending more than twice as much as him on television ads.
And if the national Democratic Party’s unpopularity had been weighing on her fortunes, the events of recent weeks may have buoyed them. In early August, Democrats in Congress passed a mammoth bill on climate change, health care, and taxes. Though the Inflation Reduction Act is by nature full of compromises, as my colleague Robinson Meyer notes, it “will touch every sector of the economy, subsidizing massive new investments in renewable and geothermal energy, as well as nuclear power and carbon capture and removal, and encouraging new clean-energy manufacturing industries to develop in the United States.” Demings has contrasted her own legislative record with that of Rubio, who has one of the worst attendance records in the Senate. With Congress showing that it can actually function, voters might be more receptive to that argument.
Demings watches the House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment hearings in 2019. (Damon Winter/The New York Times/Redux)
Demings likes to say she’s living the American dream. In 1957, when she was born, her family lived in a three-room shack in Mandarin, Florida—a rural part of Duval County, just south of Jacksonville. Her father worked as a janitor, and her mother was a housekeeper. A year later, they upgraded to a two-bedroom house, but the roof leaked and for several years it lacked working bathrooms.
In the sixth grade, Demings helped integrate Loretta Elementary School, which she used to ride past to get to the Black elementary school 15 miles away. Shortly after enrolling, Demings was chosen to serve on the school patrol. She loved it. “You had to have good citizenship and good grades—and I was selected. I had my little orange belt, and I just fell in love,” she told me in July. “It was such an honor to be selected, because it was a big deal.”
As soon as she was old enough to get a real job, she did: first washing dishes at a retirement home, and later working fast-food gigs. After high school, she went off to Florida State University to study criminology, with an eye toward becoming a lawyer. “My dad used to say, ‘You’re a pretty good talker. You need to make some money talking,’ and he thought being a lawyer was a pretty cool thing,” she said. But scraping her way through college meant she needed a job—not law school—after graduation. “I was broke broke,” she quipped. So she moved back to Jacksonville, where she became a social worker with the Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services. But she soon grew disillusioned, doubting how much good she’d ever be able to do with so little power.
“I had this 10-year-old boy on my caseload,” Demings said. “He started having some problems, exhibiting behavior that made him really a threat to himself.” She went to her supervisor to see if she could get a psychological evaluation for him, but was told it would be roughly three weeks before a referral could be made; the panel that made those decisions met only once a month.
Demings was shocked. “This kid would be dead by then,” she recalled telling her boss. So she went around her supervisor to the juvenile judge—waiting outside his chambers until she was able to plead his case. To Demings’s relief, the judge granted an emergency order. She saw it as a small victory in a tough system, until it backfired: Demings was reprimanded by her supervisor for subverting their structure. She felt deflated by the experience, and began to think about what she wanted to do next.
In 1983, Demings got word that the Orlando Police Department was recruiting at Edward Waters College, the historically Black college in Jacksonville, and she figured that she would go down to speak with someone. That ultimately led to a 27-year career at the department, where Demings worked her way through its ranks: patrol officer, juvenile-crime detective, community-relations officer, public-information officer, hostage negotiator, then supervisor of the patrol, investigations, and airport units. (Some aspects of her career were less deliberate: She always told herself that she’d never date a fellow officer—then she ended up marrying one.)
As a police captain, she developed a reputation as a tough-on-crime enforcer on everything from traffic violations to violent infractions. “The message has to be clear for the violators: There are no deals,” she said in 2005 after a string of dangerous-driving incidents.
But that approach, which continued after she was promoted to deputy chief, drew criticism from members of the Black community in the city. She was lambasted after an Orlando Sentinelstory examined the department’s overuse of tasers and aggressive traffic stops and she told the paper that her officers were “kicking butt” in the historically Black neighborhood of Parramore. “If that [vehicle or pedestrian] stop results in something greater and leads to drugs or drug paraphernalia, I call that good police work,” she said at the time.
Still, by late 2007, her policing record, and a succession of departures, led to her being selected as Orlando’s chief of police. She was the first woman and second Black person—after her husband, Jerry, who left that role in 2002 to become the county’s public-safety director—to lead the department.
From the start, she took an aggressive approach to the job. “We will be courteous to law-abiding citizens but relentless in our efforts to disrupt violent criminals who have no respect for the police, citizens or their property,” she wrote in a New Year’s Day Orlando Sentinel op-ed in 2008. Later that year, Jerry won his race for county sheriff, making the duo the first Black husband and wife to serve as sheriff and chief of police in the same county at the same time.
Demings often cites the fact that under her leadership, Orlando experienced a 40 percent drop in violent crime. But a string of excessive-force complaints—including a 2010 incident in which an officer broke an 84-year-old man’s neck by flipping him upside down—revealed some of the clear dangers of the aggressive policing tactics that were employed during her tenure. “Apparently it’s perfectly acceptable to break old men’s necks for no reason,” John Kurtz, the founder of the blog Orlando CopWatch, said at the time. Demings initially defended the officer’s actions in the incident, but eventually modified the department’s use of the technique that led to the octogenarian’s fractured vertebrae. In 2011, after 27 years with the department, Demings stepped down and set her sights on a new challenge.
Elected office wasn’t something Demings had initially been interested in. But as she was about to retire, Mayor Buddy Dyer called her to let her know that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee thought she would be a good candidate to run for the House seat that represented Orlando. “I just burst out laughing,” she told me. “And the mayor’s like, ‘Chief, are you okay?’” She thought he must have been joking. “You know your police chief. I’m a little rough around the edges,” she recalls telling him. “And I don’t know if I’d make a good politician.” Still, she met with Representative Steve Israel, who was the committee chair at the time—and ultimately decided that running for Congress was a logical next step.
She lost her first campaign and suspended another run for mayor two years later. But her defeats only raised her public profile. By 2016, court-ordered redistricting meant that the Tenth District was significantly more Democratic than it had been when she first ran for office—which meant that her biggest hurdle would be her primary opponent. She won 57 percent of the vote in a four-person primary—and received 15,000 more votes than her nearest competitor. She then won in the general election by nearly 100,000 votes.
Thirty-three years after Demings had packed everything she owned in the trunk of her Oldsmobile Firenza and headed to Orlando for her new job with the police department, she would be taking her tough-on-crime bona fides to Washington.
Across two terms, Demings has sponsored or co-sponsored dozens of bills that have become law—though a divided Congress means she does not have a signature piece of legislation to hang her hat on. But her most significant moment came when, in January 2020, she served as an impeachment manager during the first Senate trial of then-President Donald Trump. Though the Senate ultimately acquitted Trump—voting along party lines except for the sole defection of Senator Mitt Romney—Demings’s prominence continued to grow. She was profiled by The Washington Post,NPR,and other national outlets. “Was it worth it? Every day it has been worth it,” she said of the trial after its conclusion. “Just like when I was a law enforcement officer, when I saw someone breaking the law, I did not stop and think about, well, my goodness, what will the judge do? … I did my job to stop that threat and then go to court and plead my case.”
After that, she landed on Biden’s shortlist for vice president—evidence of both her meteoric rise and the Democratic Party’s relentless search for its next phenom who can capture the national imagination the way Barack Obama did.
Demings makes phone calls to constituents from the Pinellas County Democratic headquarters in Florida. (Octavio Jones / Getty)
“Florida, vota por la jefa de la policía, no por el politiquero,” Demings’s first Spanish-language ad, aired in June, said. Vote for the chief of police, not the politician. Demings is trying to define herself for voters she hopes will form her coalition—particularly the Latino voters who have been tilting Republican in recent years She’s on the defensive: The Rubio campaign has tried to pin the Democratic Party’s most left-wing sensibilities on her.
In a campaign ad of his own, Rubio touts his endorsement from Florida’s Fraternal Order of Police and 55 sheriffs, and suggests that Demings supported the “Defund the Police” movement—or, at the very least, did not reject it fiercely enough. “Senator Rubio has not only tried not to defund the police; he’s defended the police,” Al Palacio, the Miami Dade public-schools Fraternal Order of Police president, says in the ad. “And we’re here to defend him.” Rubio’s campaign believes that this is a winning issue; an October 2021 Pew Research Center survey found that 47 percent of Americans want to see more spending on police, compared with 15 percent who would like to see budgets reduced.
Demings dismissed the ad out of hand, responding with a brief statement: “I am the police. This is ridiculous.”
Though Florida has not seen the same jumps in crime rates as some other parts of the country over the past two years, the race has focused on policing and crime issues. The irony is, were she running as a Republican, Demings would be seen as emblematic of the tough-on-crime policies some voters say they want.
But because she’s running in a state that is turning redder and redder, Demings has to strike the right balance of being the police enforcer she’s always been while appearing open to reform, and being unrelentingly liberal on issues such as access to abortion while emphasizing her Christian faith so as not to isolate Catholic voters. And she has to highlight her identity—her family’s economic status growing up and, perhaps most important, her race—while not making it the central plank of her campaign. Over the past several years, Florida Republicans have passed laws that limit discussions of identity in classrooms and other public spaces—a bit of a contrast with the political campaign Demings has run, explaining to voters how being a Black woman has shaped her life and informed her policy preferences.
That’s been a difficult sell: How do you convince voters that you’ll be a senator who can get stuff done if the Democrats can manage to keep their Senate majority, when the Democrats had—at least in the public’s view—gotten so little done? But with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the party’s chances look different now, and maybe, just maybe, Demings will be the beneficiary. If Demings pulls off an upset, it will be not solely because she’s a Black woman, but because the Democrats finally figured out how to rack up some wins in D.C. And what could be a greater crowd-pleaser than that?
