MI-SEN: Abdul El-Sayed distances himself from past defund-the-police rhetoric

[RandySF]

Democratic U.S. Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed is downplaying his past rhetoric around defunding the police, saying his approach to the issue has been influenced by his time helping run health services in Wayne County jails.

“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 said in a recent interview with The Detroit News.

“Law enforcement exists for a reason, but ideally you want to make sure that there are not folks out there committing crimes in the first place,” he added.

“Structurally, we got to get right about the fact that too often crime is a function of the investment that we make in certain communities, and I think we need to be making a lot more investments in things like quality education and housing.”



https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2025/11/15/abdul-el-sayed-distances-himself-from-past-defund-the-police-rhetoric/87276996007/

[MichMan]

1. Primary voters will have to decide.

Article states he deleted dozens of social media posts, so expect some of those to resurface as we get closer to the primary

2020

“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.”

“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 says he like to talk about it as “re-funding.”

“I want a re-fund on the taxpayer dollars that I pay to police who use that to buy war materiel to wage war in our streets. And I want to re-fund public health and public libraries and public schools and the means of uprooting poverty,” he says. “What we call that is, to me, less important than what we do on the problems on the ground.”

https://wdet.org/2020/06/23/Former-Gubernatorial-Candidate-Abdul-El-Sayed-On-Policing-and-Public-Health/

[Jose Garcia]

2. General election votes will be even less keen on this rhetoric