Bill Johnson knew, before he reached out to Joe Biden's campaign last spring, that things had changed between the former vice president and the nation's police unions. A once-close alliance had frayed after clashes over police brutality and racism in the justice system.
Still, Johnson, the executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations, invited Biden to address the group as it weighed its 2020 endorsement.
For weeks, the campaign was politely noncommittal, Johnson said. Finally, he recalled, on the day the police organization was deciding its endorsement, he heard from a campaign aide asking if there was still time to send a message. "Not to be a jerk, but we were literally starting the meeting," Johnson said. "It's kind of a little late."
The police federation, which twice endorsed the Obama-Biden ticket and stayed neutral in 2016, backed President Donald Trump in July. Soon after, its president told the Republican convention that Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris were "the most radical anti-police ticket in history."
That attack marked a low point in a political relationship that had endured for most of Biden's career.
If elected, Biden would bring to the White House a long career's worth of relationships with police chiefs, union leaders and policy experts that is unmatched by any other major figure in the Democratic Party, according to more than a dozen current and former law enforcement officials who have worked with Biden in various capacities.
During a late-summer speech in Pittsburgh, Biden pledged to draw both racial-justice activists and police leaders "to the table" to forge durable solutions.
"I have worked with police in this country for many years," Biden said. "I know most cops are good, decent people. I know how they risk their lives every time they put that shield on."
Yet the 2020 election has also underscored the difficulty Biden may have in achieving that goal. He is presenting himself as both a criminal-justice reformer and a friend to diligent police officers, a critic of racism and rioting alike.
But Biden has seen his formal support from prominent law enforcement groups disintegrate as those organizations closed ranks against reform legislation. They have objected to Biden's rhetoric about "systemic racism" in policing and to his vows to regulate police agencies with federal power, even as reformers on the left press Biden to take up far bolder changes, such as defunding the police.
He has alluded, during the current campaign, to an affinity for law enforcement dating to his upbringing in Pennsylvania and Delaware. "There were three things all my friends became," he said in a September town hall, "a cop, a firefighter and a priest."
By 1994, Biden had partnered with police groups to devise the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, a sprawling law that poured money into enforcement, banned assault-style weapons, toughened sentences for drug- and gang-related offenses and expanded the federal death penalty, among other measures.
The bill was so sweeping in its scope and so stern in its penalties that it came to be a political liability for Biden in this year's Democratic primaries. At the time, it was a popular achievement that thrilled police groups.
"This translated into a tremendous amount of goodwill for Biden, both nationally and in his home state," said James Pasco, the executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, a group currently supporting Trump.
It was during the 2008 presidential transition that Biden, as vice president-elect, told a few police officials that he planned to be their point of contact in the new administration.
Gil Kerlikowske, a former Seattle police chief who worked closely with Biden as the top federal drug-control official, said Biden has spoken frankly about the value of enlisting law enforcement leaders in the pursuit of progressive goals. The former vice president, he said, saw public safety as a foundational issue for most voters -- one on which they would not excuse failure.
"The safety and security issue, to the public, is an important one," said Kerlikowske, who described Biden as walking a "very fine line" in the current campaign.
In their work together, Kerlikowske said he had not previously heard Biden use language like "systemic racism," though he said Biden was sensitive to the issue of bias.
In the summer of 2016, Biden sat with former President Barack Obama in the Roosevelt Room at the White House, an array of police leaders before them. Five police officers had been gunned down in Dallas by a man driven by animus against lawmen. The president and vice president both pleaded with union leaders to temper their rhetoric about a nationwide "war on cops."
The vice president, Johnson recalled, made a personal appeal to the police groups, to the effect of: "You know me, you can trust me, I've always been there for you."
But if Biden's easy manner and concern for police helped bring police groups to the table, some law enforcement leaders felt a mounting sense of grievance as they saw the administration take up a reform agenda. Pasco, of the Fraternal Order of Police, said that for all Biden's heartfelt outreach, he was still "on the anti-police side of these issues."