Michigan Democratic Senate front-runner Abdul El-Sayed has confronted criticism for previous comments he made about defunding the police. In current interviews, El-Sayed has insisted he “never, never called for defunding” the police. Last week in an interview with NCS’s Kasie Hunt, he stated he deleted outdated tweets supporting the movement as a result of they had been taken “out of context,” calling them “clickbait in DC.”
But interviews from 2020 present El-Sayed repeatedly endorsed defunding the police, in accordance to a NCS KFile assessment of his media appearances. “We do need to defund the police,” El-Sayed stated in a 2020 radio interview whereas particularly discussing how the slogan may undermine legal justice reform efforts.
El-Sayed’s interviews from 2020 and 2021 present him embracing the “defund the police” movement — not simply uttering the phrase however supporting the key precept of reinvesting funds from the police into different public-sector areas resembling psychological well being and anti-poverty efforts.
His feedback got here throughout the top of the defund movement’s reputation following George Floyd’s homicide in May 2020. While the movement gained traction amongst progressives, it remained politically unpopular with the broader public.
“We are in a moment where a lot of our public conversation gets chewed down into 280 characters or less,” El-Sayed said in June 2020 on Detroit Public Radio, arguing it was higher to clarify what wanted to be accomplished than hedging “behind a hashtag.” El-Sayed at the time was a public well being advocate, podcast host and Detroit’s former public well being director.
“I believe that we do need to defund the police in so far as defunding the police is disinvesting in the means of incarcerating someone or killing them on the streets,” he added. “And in investing more in the means of educating and empowering, engaging communities with the means of being able to take on systemic poverty, that we’ve allowed systematic racism to allow to fester in too many communities.”
El-Sayed added it meant investing much less cash in police.
“What if we were to invest in social services? What if we were to invest in public schools? What if we were to invest in public libraries? What would the world look like there? And I think that has to be the way we go. And that means both investing more in these services, and it also means investing less in police,” he stated.
Roxie Richner, a spokesperson for his marketing campaign, pointed to El-Sayed’s public well being expertise working with native legislation enforcement in Wayne County, Michigan, and instructed NCS in an announcement that “his perspective has become more nuanced.”
“One simple word has never been enough to fully explain the reforms we need for a challenge as complex as our criminal legal system,” Richner stated.
“Just as he did in Wayne County in 2023, Abdul believes we need to improve law enforcement recruitment, retention, and retirement funding so that law enforcement officers come from the communities they serve. He also believes we must reject militarized policing, pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, and opt for community violence intervention, behavioral health response, and improvements in public health to reduce violence and protect the lives of communities and law enforcement alike.”
El-Sayed has emerged as the Democratic front-runner forward of Michigan’s August 4 main in one in all the nation’s most closely watched Senate races. He will face US Rep. Haley Stevens after state Sen. Mallory McMorrow dropped out Sunday.
El-Sayed and Stevens are scheduled to face off Tuesday night time in a statewide televised debate.
The winner of the Democratic main is predicted to face Republican former Rep. Mike Rogers in November. In a battleground state carried by President Donald Trump in two of the final three elections, together with 2024, Michigan Republicans are seemingly to scrutinize Democrats’ previous positions on crime and policing.
El-Sayed, a 41-year-old progressive activist, 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.
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 surveyed Michigan registered voters had a positive view of their native police. A 2021 Axios/Ipsos ballot found that simply 27% of respondents supported the “defund the police” movement as of April 2021, with 70% opposed to it.
When requested final week by NCS’s Kasie Hunt on whether or not he nonetheless supported defunding the police, El-Sayed didn’t immediately reply however stated his tweets had been taken out of context.
Michigan Democratic Senate candidate, Abdul El-Sayed on what democrats can study from proressive candidates
“I deleted all the tweets because I didn’t want them to be taken out of context like this so that you could distract from the actual conversation that Michiganders really want to have about what they want their leadership to actually fight for them to do,” El-Sayed stated.
Pressed twice by Hunt on whether or not he nonetheless helps defunding the police, El-Sayed didn’t immediately reply. Instead, he stated voters ought to choose him by his document operating Wayne County’s Department of Health, Human and Veterans Services, saying he “funded the system because it needed to be funded.”
“I think this debate about 2020 and the ways that tweets are going to play are really nice on NCS if you want to get clicks,” he added. “They’re not that effective, and nobody really asks me about them on the streets or in communities in Michigan. So, if you want to talk about housing or health care or corporate dominance in our politics, I think those are a lot more legitimate questions that people are actually asking me about what they want their next senator to do in the state of Michigan, rather than for clickbait in DC.”
The interview got here after El-Sayed beforehand sought to distance himself from the slogan after NCS reported on his deleted tweets in November 2025.
In an interview with the Detroit News shortly after the article was published, he stated, “I want to be clear, I actually never, never called for defunding. My goal in that conversation was to help everybody to understand what we were talking about.”
But the deleted tweets NCS reported present El-Sayed repeatedly embraced the substance of the defund movement, even when he framed it as “refunding” different public providers. NCS tallied hundreds of deleted tweets, together with a couple of dozen in assist of the “defund the police” movement.
“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 put up.
El-Sayed’s deleted tweets weren’t his solely public expressions of assist for defunding the police.
Throughout 2020, he repeatedly endorsed a few of the movement’s targets in interviews, speeches and writings, typically describing them as shifting authorities assets away from policing and incarceration and towards public well being, schooling and anti-poverty applications.
“The question becomes, where are the places that we as a society ought to invest? Should we be investing in militarized police — police that have military materiel — or should we be investing in mental health services, poverty reduction, food, walkability, higher-quality air and better access to water?” he stated in November 2020 when talking to a school group, in accordance to the Manistee News Advocate, a neighborhood newspaper.
And in May 2021, El-Sayed wrote on his Substack that as an alternative of getting productive conversations to fight rising crime, the dialogue “will likely reduce back to the debate about policing.”
“The irony of this is that those advocating for reductions in police budgets aren’t doing so in a vacuum: they’re advocating for those dollars to be invested in taking on exactly the same causes of insecurity that the pandemic exacerbated that underlie so many of its consequences, like crime,” he wrote. “Smaller police budgets mean more investment in housing, childcare, food assistance, and income support.”
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 materiel 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 at the 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 materiel 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 engaging communities,” El-Sayed stated in another 2020 native press interview.