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The front-runner in Michigan’s messy Democratic primary has repeatedly said he never called for defunding the police, but unearthed interviews and video from years earlier tell a different story.
Abdul El-Sayed, who is running for the Democratic nomination in Michigan against Rep. Haley Stevens, D-Mich., has been adamant throughout his push for the Senate that he never wanted to strip tax dollars from police departments, going so far as to say he deleted old tweets embracing the ideology.
But in a video for the University of Michigan published five years ago titled, “Systemic Racism as a Public Health Issue,” El-Sayed argued that funding police and their use of force was a facet of systemic racism and constituted a public health issue.
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“Why are we investing so much in people with guns and less in people with the means of being able to invest in young folks, empower folks through their livelihoods, and empower them to live their best lives?” El-Sayed questioned.
“Do police really need to use guns? Do we need as much of a police force?” he continued. “And so, if we ask ourselves about how we spend money in the public, where that money goes, where it comes from, we need to make a lot better decisions about investing in the things that root out poverty, rather than investing in policing poverty.”
The video follows a report from CNN that found during the height of the “defund the police” movement in 2020, El-Sayed leaned into it.
During an interview with Detroit Public Radio from June 2020, El-Sayed argued that he never directly called to “defund the police,” but he contended that the principles behind the movement were difficult to express online in a tweet.
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“So, you’ll note, I didn’t say ‘defund the police,’ I just described what needed to be done,” El-Sayed said. “And I do think we need to be really focused on describing or explaining rather than sort of hedging on one side or the other behind a hashtag.”
“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 with the means of being able to take on systemic poverty that we’ve allowed to fester in too many communities.”
El-Sayed tried to pitch his stance as “refunding” the police to ensure taxpayer dollars don’t flow to “buy war materiel to wage war in our streets.”
“What we call that is, to me, less important than what we do on the problems on the ground,” he said at the time.
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Roxie Richner, a campaign spokesperson for El-Sayed, said in a statement to Fox News Digital that he worked closely with law enforcement during his time as director of Health, Human, and Veterans Services for Wayne County, Michigan, and that “as hands-on experience always allows, 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,” she said.
“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,” Richner continued. “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.”
Still, El-Sayed has sought to clean up his position on the matter as he runs ahead in one of the most consequential races of the 2026 midterm cycle.
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He and Stevens are vying to replace retiring Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., for a seat Republicans are hungry to flip.
And more broadly, El-Sayed is part of the progressive wave that is flooding into the Democratic Party, sporting endorsements from progressive heavyweights like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.
The candidate, however, can’t seem to shake off his posts and interviews from years ago despite this support.
Just last week during an interview with CNN’s Kasie Hunt, El-Sayed was pressed on his old posts and shot back that he “deleted all the tweets, because I didn’t want them to be taken out of context like this.”
He chalked up the issue to “clickbait in D.C.”
“I think this debate about 2020 and the ways that tweets are going to play are really nice on CNN if you want to get clicks,” El-Sayed said. “They’re not that effective, and nobody really asks me about them on the streets or in communities in Michigan.”
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