The Sheriff’s Race Pitting Trump Against Black Lives Matter
The race for sheriff of Brevard County — the stretch of Florida coast east of Orlando that includes Cape Canaveral — has become a political test case for competing visions of American law enforcement.
The Republican incumbent, Wayne Ivey, is known nationally for tough-on-crime viral videos, in which he spins through mugshots on a “Wheel of Fugitive” and encourages citizens to arm themselves and confront the “bad guys” before his deputies arrive. Elected in 2012, Ivey ran unopposed in 2016 as Donald Trump swept the county by 19 points. Since then, the sheriff has appeared with the president at campaign rallies and White House events.
This November, Ivey will face Alton Edmond, a Black former public defender running as a Democrat, who promises to buy body cameras for deputies, increase diversity among top staff, ban the neck restraint tactic used by the police who killed George Floyd in Minneapolis, and stop making viral videos about suspects, which he calls “dehumanizing.”
But his best-known promise is to release a different kind of video: of a death in the jail that Ivey runs.
In 2018, a Black military veteran named Gregory Edwards was arrested during a PTSD episode, which, , stemmed, and prosecutors cleared the deputies of wrongdoing.
