Yes, Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed Really Wants To Defund The Police. Here Are The Receipts.

Despite claims that he never pushed to defund the police, leftist darling Abdul El-Sayed once said that “we do need to defund the police” and argued that funds used for law enforcement should go to public libraries instead. 

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El-Sayed, running for the Democratic Senate nomination in Michigan, argues that he “never, never, called for defunding” the police. That claim contrasts with anti-police positions he took during the summer of 2020 as riots broke out over the death of convicted felon George Floyd in Minneapolis. 

“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 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 a fester in too many communities,” El-Sayed said in a June 23, 2020 MichMash Politics interview first flagged by CNN. 

That comment came after he suggested that he generally did not use the term “defund the police” but advocated for the policies pushed by the movement. 

“Rather than investing in a force of people who respond with guns and put people in jails, what if we were to take on systematic poverty by investing in the means of uprooting that poverty itself?” he said. “What if we were to invest in social services? If we were to invest in public schools? What if we were to invest in public libraries?”

El-Sayed is facing off against Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) in the competitive Democratic primary race to replace outgoing Senator Gary Peters. The winner of the primary will likely go on to run against Republican Mike Rogers.

Facing scrutiny over his previous police rhetoric, El-Sayed is now trying to distance himself from the defund the police movement. That contradicts what he told MichMash back in June 2020. 

“I want a refund on the taxpayer dollars that I pay to police who use that to buy war material, to wage war in our streets, and I want to refund public health and public libraries and public schools,” El-Sayed said. 

Later in the same interview, he argued that people imprisoned are the real victims of crime because of “over-policing” and failure to combat poverty. 

“The fact of the matter is every single person winds up in jail, or worse, dead, at the hands of a police officer, has been failed by our system, either directly because of our over-policing, or indirectly because we have failed to invest in the things that uproot poverty in communities across the country,” he said.

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The Daily Wire reached out to El-Sayed, the former public health director for Detroit, to explain his stance on defunding the police. 

“Abdul worked closely with law enforcement as Director of Health, Human, and Veterans services for Wayne County. As hands-on experience always allows, his perspective has become more nuanced,” campaign spokeswoman Roxie Richner told The Daily Wire. “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 added that El-Sayed believes “we need to improve law enforcement recruitment, retention, and retirement funding so that law enforcement officers come from the communities they serve.” El-Sayed also supports “community violence intervention” policies and the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, Richner said. The act would weaken legal protections for police officers. 

That response was similar to the comment given to CNN for an article highlighting El-Sayed’s history of anti-police rhetoric. The outlet noted that El-Sayed had deleted at least a dozen posts pushing defund the police policies. 

“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,” he wrote in one post from June 2020 that he later deleted. 

El-Sayed, who claims that Floyd was the victim of an “assassination” and was “lynched,” suggested during a seminar hosted by the University of Michigan that police officers should not be armed. 

“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 asked. 

He added that the “defund the police” movement was about getting the government to move away from “racist ideologies” that led police to “invest in war material” for law enforcement.

During his time pushing anti-police rhetoric, El-Sayed was heavily involved in a group called Michigan United which compared police officers to “slave catchers” and helped organize a protest that turned into a riot, the Washington Free Beacon reported.

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