Abdul El-Sayed, a far-left candidate who is well positioned to become the Democratic Party nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, is facing backlash over his attempts to walk back previous support for “defund the police” initiatives.
In interviews with CNN and the Detroit News, El-Sayed has stated he did not call for defunding the police. “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,” he said in a recent interview with the Detroit News.
In a recent interview with CNN’s Kasie Hunt, he addressed deleted tweets supporting the movement, saying they were taken “out of context” and describing them as “clickbait in DC.”
He added, “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.”
When asked whether he still supports defunding the police, El-Sayed did not answer directly. He referred instead to his record and said voters should judge him by his work running Wayne County’s Department of Health, Human, and Veterans Services, where he “funded the system because it needed to be funded.”
A CNN review of El-Sayed’s 2020 media appearances found multiple instances in which he endorsed the movement, including support for reinvesting funds from policing into other public services such as mental health and anti-poverty programs. These comments occurred during the period following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, when the “defund the police” movement gained attention among some progressives but remained broadly unpopular in polling.
“We do need to defund the police,” El-Sayed said in one radio interview. While speaking with Detroit Public Radio in June 2020, he stated: “We are in a moment where a lot of our public conversation gets chewed down into 280 characters or less,” and argued it was better to explain needed actions than to hedge behind a hashtag.
“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. 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,” he added.
CNN also reported on since-deleted tweets from June 2020. “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,” the candidate wrote in one of the deleted posts.
A spokesperson for El-Sayed’s campaign, Roxie Richner, told CNN that his perspective “has become more nuanced” in recent years
“One simple word has never been enough to fully explain the reforms we need for a challenge as complex as our criminal legal system,” the statement continued. It added that El-Sayed supports improving law enforcement recruitment, retention, and retirement funding so officers come from the communities they serve; rejecting militarized policing and passing the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act.
The report noted polling from the period showing the “defund the police” slogan was unpopular. A July 2020 Fox News poll found 82 percent of Michigan registered voters had a favorable view of their local police. A 2021 Axios/Ipsos poll showed only 27 percent support for the movement and 70 percent opposition.
