Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive Democrat working for the US Senate in Michigan, has quietly erased hundreds of previous social media posts — together with a dozen tweets that championed the “defund the police” motion, described police as “standing armies,” and urged cities to divert cash from legislation enforcement to social providers.
The former Detroit well being director deleted his whole X historical past someday earlier than launching his Senate marketing campaign in April, a transfer that highlights how progressive Democrats as soon as aligned with “defund” insurance policies at the moment are distancing themselves from a slogan that is still deeply unpopular with voters.
“Most major US cities spend WAY TOO MUCH on police departments to police poverty & WAY TOO LITTLE on public schools, health departments, recreation departments, & housing to eliminate poverty. Fixing that is what the #Defund movement is about,” El-Sayed wrote in a since-deleted post from June 2020.
“The police have become standing armies we deploy against our own people,” he added in another June 2020 publish.
In a crowded Democratic major for the Senate seat, early polling reveals El-Sayed trailing barely behind Rep. Haley Stevens, with state Sen. Mallory McMorrow shut behind. The race stays fluid, and nationwide Democrats take into account it considered one of the best primaries in the nation — with the winner to face a well-funded Republican in a state that might determine management of the Senate.
El-Sayed, a 41-year-old progressive activist, graduated from the University of Michigan and Columbia Medical School. He was a Rhodes Scholar and later earned a doctorate in public well being from the University of Oxford.
He served as the lead public well being official for the Detroit Health Department and later as the head of Wayne County’s Department of Health, Human and Veterans Services. He additionally hosted a podcast, “America Dissected,” and served as a NCS contributor.
A NCS KFile overview of feedback El-Sayed made out of 2020 to 2021 discovered he repeatedly mentioned US police departments had been overfunded and promoted what he referred to as the “refund movement” — a plan to redirect taxpayer cash from police budgets to social providers for colleges, libraries, parks and clinics.
A NCS tally of his deleted tweets discovered he posted a few dozen instances in support of the “defund the police” motion.
Past variations of El-Sayed’s marketing campaign web site throughout his failed run for governor in 2018 additionally included a 20-page policy document on felony justice reforms. The proposal gives a litany of progressive insurance policies, together with enhancing police coaching and accountability, jail and sentencing reform, ending money bail, hiring extra public defenders, and helping lately launched prisoners.
Now, neither his present posts on each social media nor his marketing campaign coverage web page mentions policing or felony justice.
The El-Sayed marketing campaign didn’t deal with his tweets and pointed to endorsements from a former and sitting sheriff. In an announcement to NCS, marketing campaign spokesperson Roxie Richner mentioned, “Rather than defund Police, Dr. El-Sayed is challenging government choices that defund food, healthcare, and social services while militarizing agencies like ICE in sharp contrast to Donald Trump’s presidency because real safety comes from investing in people — not in tanks and tear gas.”
El-Sayed’s deleted tweets are nonetheless viewable on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which archives previous webpages and posts, and present his tweets had been nonetheless on his web page as late as 2023.
The since-deleted posts, made principally in the summer season of 2020 throughout the racial justice protests in the wake of the homicide of George Floyd, underscore the problem El-Sayed and different progressives face in reconciling their earlier — and very unpopular — “defund the police” rhetoric with the broader coalition they should win.
Even in 2020, polling repeatedly showed insurance policies advocating to “defund the police” had been extraordinarily unpopular. A Fox News ballot from July 2020 confirmed that 82% of Michigan registered voters had a good view of their native police. A 2021 Axios/Ipsos ballot found that simply 27% of respondents supported the “defund the police” motion as of April 2021, with 70% against it.
“Defunding the police is as popular as the Ohio State Buckeyes are in Michigan,” mentioned Harry Enten, NCS’s chief information analyst. “It’s not just an unpopular position, it becomes a political cudgel, used to signal that a candidate is out of step on a whole range of issues.”
El-Sayed’s feedback weren’t remoted to social media.
An epidemiologist, El-Sayed typically framed “systemic racism and police brutality” as a public well being situation. In the summer season of 2020, El-Sayed was a contributor in an online University of Michigan seminar on police brutality in America.
“So we have to ask ourselves, do police departments really need tanks and weapons of war and the material that’s coming back as hand-me-downs from the military abroad? Do police really need to use guns? Do we need as much of a police force?” he said in July 2, 2020, at the University of Michigan seminar.
He continued, “When we talk about the question of quote-un-quote ‘defunding the police,’ it’s a question of asking, how do we right-size government away from the racist ideologies that have led us to investing in war material for policing rather than public health for children?”
“Defunding the police is disinvesting in the means of incarcerating someone or killing them on the streets and investing more in the means of educating and empowering and engaging communities,” El-Sayed mentioned in another 2020 native press interview.
During the summer season of 2020, El-Sayed urged supporters to maintain protesting regardless of the heightened danger from the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Don’t pit the #protests against #publichealth: an excess of 83,000 Black Americans die every year because of racism, and that itself is a public health issue,” learn one since-purged publish.
At the peak of the 2020 protests, El-Sayed’s social media feed and public commentary mirrored a sweeping critique of American policing.
“Our country’s failures are connected,” he wrote in a June 2020 since-deleted publish. “#GeorgeFloyd and hundreds of other Black folks are murdered because our police departments are OVERfunded. #COVID19 devastated us, in part, because our health departments are UNDERfunded. There’s an obvious answer: take from one and give to the other.”
Days later, he argued that policing was “so broken it can’t be fixed,” urging that “schools, libraries, parks, [and] clinics” needs to be reinvested in as an alternative.
In one other publish, he dismissed the pro-police slogan that emerged in response to Black Lives Matter. “Unless you’re a smurf, you weren’t born ‘blue,’” he wrote. “I really don’t understand what #BlueLivesMatter even means — except that you want something to say other than what you really think, which is that you don’t believe #BlackLivesMatter.”
In one other tweet, he drew on his expertise in metropolis authorities: “I experienced firsthand what bloated police budgets meant for other city budgets, like #publichealth… part of its budget was gobbled up by police.” By the finish of that 12 months, he reframed the trigger as a “#REfund movement,” writing, “We demand a refund on all tax dollars to fund military police and brutality… to use those dollars to RE-fund housing, public health, schools, libraries, parks, [and] infrastructure.”
As late as 2022, El-Sayed continued to query the construction of policing. “If I’ve learned anything about police in my 37 years,” he tweeted that spring, “it’s that they are the least willing to be policed.” After the deadly police taking pictures of Patrick Lyoya in Grand Rapids, he added, “Nearly two years after the murder of George Floyd — we have SO much further to go.”