Most political pundits, Democratic insiders, and leaks from Biden’s campaign have concluded that Biden has narrowed the list for his vice presidential running mate to six: they include four black women, Dr. Susan Rice, Obama’s former National Security Advisor and U.N. Ambassador; Rep. Val Demings (D-FL); Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA); Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms (D); one Latina, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-NM); and a white female, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), an earlier frontrunner, has become an outlier since George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis in Hennepin County where she was District Attorney. Klobuchar presided over the deaths of more than a dozen questionable killings of minority males by police officers where not one assailant was penalized. During her tenure, she also dismissed excessive force charges against Officer Derek Chauvin who later killed George Floyd.

Biden has a history of being aligned with the nation’s law enforcement officers, including Tom Scotto, past president of the National Association of Police Organizations, which represents a quarter million police department employees. He was also the primary drafter of Biden’s 1994 Crime Bill.

Scotto was instrumental in scripting the provision that sent billions of dollars in federal funds to local police departments for the hiring of 100,000 police officers, and Biden willingly gave him and members of the groups he represented the credit he felt they deserved when he offered: “You guys sat at that conference table of mine for a six-month period, and you wrote the bill.”

This provision resulted in massive expenditures for new equipment. But the more egregious outcomes were the exponential increases in arrests and the building of prisons where over 70 percent of inmates are African American, Latinx, new Asian immigrants, and Native American. This mass incarceration continues to cripple many contemporary communities of color today.

To pacify the black community social service organizations, Biden, with President Bill Clinton, passed out millions of dollars of pork-barrel projects to members of the Congressional Black Caucus which was spearheaded by its then chairman, Kweisi Mfume, to gain black support. (After a 24-year absence and the death of his successor, Elijah Cummings, Mfume has returned to his former seat.)

Given this history, it is not surprising that now that Biden’s vice presidential candidates have been whittled down, “cops and police sympathizers” continue to prevail in number. The leading contestant to be Biden’s VP choice is the top cop, Kamala Harris, who served as City Attorney of San Francisco and as Attorney General of California.

Harris’s sordid record in locking up males of color and trying to incarcerate low-income parents for their children’s truancy from public schools could prove problematic. In the current era of excessive police abuse, murder of minority males, and cries of “Black Lives Matter,” she could prove to be a tough sale to black and progressive communities.

We could say the same of Mayor Bottoms who is now enveloped in the aftermath of last Friday’s killing of 27-year old Rayshard Brooks by Atlanta police under questionable circumstances. Following the incident, she orchestrated the resignation of her police chief, Erika Shields, but kept her on the city’s administrative staff in a high salaried position.

Chief Shields, a two decade departmental veteran who worked her way up from the bottom, had to be aware of the rotten police culture that she supervised. Thus, it is inexcusable that Bottoms didn’t wipe the slate clean as she did with the two cops involved in the shooting. Given the current political reality she finds herself in and the fact that she was promoted for VP in the first place primarily to give Biden’s anti-Stacey Abrams advisors a black Georgia female replacement, she is no longer in the mix.

While some Biden advisors may oppose Ms. Abrams, her clear articulation of the issues and values is resonating among younger Democrats and protesters. Ms. Abrams has also been forceful in pushing back against recent voter suppression tactics in Georgia and elsewhere and continues to be the only VP candidate who possesses these skills which will be abundantly necessary in the fall campaign as Trump goes to the “political mattresses.” Biden needs a battle-tested warrior to lead the ground game against Trump and Pence. Ms. Abrams is the only one of the six who can stand up to the challenge.

Rep. Val Demings, who also served as Orlando, Florida’s police chief, is fading in consideration due to the fraught police-community tensions swirling across the nation. Her record as a police administrator was middling at best and included a serious episode where one of her officers who broke the neck of an 84-year old senior citizen during an arrest was exonerated by Demings.

The only asset that Rep. Demings would bring to the ticket is that she is black.

What is most disturbing is that these two cops, Harris and Demings, have not spoken out about the police slaying of Rayshard Brooks, videos of him being shot in the back after a scuffle while running away, or the fact that the officers had already determined that he did not possess a lethal weapon. This delay is another example of their favor toward the police.

People are perplexed and fail to understand why Dr. Rice is on the short list (other than her being a good friend of Joe and Jill Biden). Her misstatements on the Benghazi murders would provide Trump with fresh campaign fodder. Gov. Lujan Grisham seems to have been included as an effort by the Biden campaign to reach out to the Latinx community, America’s largest minority demographic group, among whom he performed poorly during the Democratic presidential primary.

Although Elizabeth Warren, the sole Caucasian under review, is the preferred choice of the Biden team and most of the Democratic donor class, they are politically queasy about alienating the Democratic Party’s most loyal and necessary black base, which they need to motivate to win. There is no way in 2020 that most black voters will view a ticket comprised of two 70 plus-year old white people as an acceptable representation of today’s Democratic Party.

The Biden campaign is operating under a mistaken theory of the race in which the multi-racial millennial groups that have been leading daily protests in the streets since the May 25th murder of George Floyd will turn out for him in extraordinary numbers because of their anger at Trump and the police. This expectation alone may not be sufficient to ensure his victory.

Since Biden has been pro-cop for the majority of his political career, his choice of a cop to run beside him could be hard explain on the election trail. Trump has effectively locked up police support and a good chunk of their backers, and a Biden cop VP pick to run against him could likely backfire.

There are substantial ideological, class, and age cleavages in the African American community. Therefore, it is naïve for him and his campaign crew to view African Americans as a monolithic voting group and believe that simply putting a black on his ticket will galvanize their turnout in his favor. That view is wrong! Women did not turnout for Hillary Clinton in 2016 just because she is a woman, and Keisha Lance Bottoms, Susan Rice, Kamala Harris, and Val Demings will not automatically stimulate increased black support or turnout for Biden on November 3rd.

All four have yet to show that they have a national African American following and are largely unknown among the mass black community. Harris demonstrated this during the Democratic presidential primary by barely registering in the double digits in polling among blacks. Biden is in a difficult position and must choose his VP wisely - one that he urgently needs to excite black voters, if he is to defeat Trump.

Finally, Biden needs to reframe his opposition to the increasingly popular “Defund the Police” movement being championed by the protesters and other progressives. He needs to explain that he is empathetic to diversifying police budgets to be inclusive of social workers and mental health counselors which would relieve pressures on police officers to address social issues and would possibly save black lives.

Even more urgent is that Biden recognizes that this race will not be determined by who leads in the polls but on whether he or Trump can get their supporters out to vote. With Trump’s aggressive undermining of election integrity, aided by Russian trolls, he is currently positioned to win in the head-to-head matchup. Biden needs to get busy in employing a counter strategy.