Far-left Muslim Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is facing renewed scrutiny after newly surfaced audio revealed him explicitly supporting efforts to defund police departments.
In his previous interviews, El-Sayed has denied ever calling to defund the police, arguing that his old social media posts were misrepresented after being taken out of context. But recordings from 2020 tell a different story.
In one interview from June 2020, El-Sayed said he believed police funding should be reduced while more taxpayer dollars should be directed toward schools, mental health services, and anti-poverty programs.
“We are in a moment when a lot of our public conversation gets chewed down into 280 characters or less. And that is not the best way to talk about anything. So, you’ll note, I didn’t say ‘defund the police,’ I just described what needed to be done. 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,” El-Sayed said in 2020.
“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.”
These comments originally came out back in 2020, right as the “defund the police” movement was picking up steam after the death of George Floyd. El-Sayed’s campaign now admits his views have changed since then.
But the issue is coming up again because El-Sayed is currently leading the Democrat primary for Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat. A Mitchell Research poll from earlier this May shows him out front with 28%. Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) is trailing at 18%, and State Senator Mallory McMorrow is at 17%, but she just suspended her campaign earlier this month, narrowing this down to a two-person race.
El-Sayed is scheduled to debate Stevens before the August primary. Whoever wins that match is expected to go head-to-head with Michigan Republican Senate candidate and former House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers in November.
Just last week, El-Sayed wouldn’t give a straight yes-or-no answer when asked if he still supports defunding the police. Instead, he pointed to his time running Wayne County’s health and veterans department, telling voters they should judge him on his actual track record rather than things he said in 2020.
In a previous interview with Detroit News, he said, “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.”
El-Sayed has repeatedly voiced support for the defund movement in several social media posts that he later deleted, arguing that police departments receive too much funding while other public services are neglected.
“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 post.
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