‘We do need to defund the police’: 2020 interviews undermine Abdul El-Sayed’s claim he never advocated for unpopular movement
By Andrew Kaczynski, Em Steck, CNN
(CNN) — Michigan Democratic Senate front-runner Abdul El-Sayed has faced criticism for previous comments he made about defunding the police. In recent interviews, El-Sayed has insisted he “never, never called for defunding” the police. Last week in an interview with CNN’s Kasie Hunt, he said he deleted old tweets supporting the movement because they were taken “out of context,” calling them “clickbait in DC.”
But interviews from 2020 show El-Sayed repeatedly endorsed defunding the police, according to a CNN KFile review of his media appearances. “We do need to defund the police,” El-Sayed said in a 2020 radio interview while specifically discussing how the slogan could undermine criminal justice reform efforts.
El-Sayed’s interviews from 2020 and 2021 show him embracing the “defund the police” movement — not just uttering the phrase but supporting the key principle of reinvesting funds from the police into other public-sector spaces such as mental health and anti-poverty efforts.
His comments came during the height of the defund movement’s popularity following George Floyd’s murder in May 2020. While the movement gained traction among progressives, it remained politically unpopular with the broader public.
“We are in a moment where a lot of our public conversation gets chewed down into 280 characters or less,” El-Sayed said in June 2020 on Detroit Public Radio, arguing it was better to explain what needed to be done than hedging “behind a hashtag.” El-Sayed at the time was a public health advocate, podcast host and Detroit’s former public health director.
“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,” he added. “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.”
El-Sayed added it meant investing less money in police.
“What if we were to invest in social services? What if we were to invest in public schools? What if we were to invest in public libraries? What would the world look like there? And I think that has to be the way we go. And that means both investing more in these services, and it also means investing less in police,” he said.
Roxie Richner, a spokesperson for his campaign, pointed to El-Sayed’s public health experience working with local law enforcement in Wayne County, Michigan, and told CNN in a statement that “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,” Richner 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. 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.”
Drawing fire as front-runner
El-Sayed has emerged as the Democratic front-runner ahead of Michigan’s August 4 primary in one of the country’s most closely watched Senate races. He will face US Rep. Haley Stevens after state Sen. Mallory McMorrow dropped out Sunday.
El-Sayed and Stevens are scheduled to face off Tuesday night in a statewide televised debate.
The winner of the Democratic primary is expected to face Republican former Rep. Mike Rogers in November. In a battleground state carried by President Donald Trump in two of the last three elections, including 2024, Michigan Republicans are likely to scrutinize Democrats’ past positions on crime and policing.
El-Sayed, a 41-year-old progressive activist, served as the lead public health official for the Detroit Health Department and later as the head of Wayne County’s Department of Health, Human and Veterans Services. He also hosted a podcast, “America Dissected,” and served as a CNN contributor.
Even in 2020, polling repeatedly showed policies advocating to “defund the police” were extremely unpopular. A Fox News poll from July 2020 showed that 82% of surveyed Michigan registered voters had a favorable view of their local police. A 2021 Axios/Ipsos poll found that just 27% of respondents supported the “defund the police” movement as of April 2021, with 70% opposed to it.
When asked last week by CNN’s Kasie Hunt on whether he still supported defunding the police, El-Sayed did not directly answer but said his tweets were taken out of context.
“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,” El-Sayed said.
Pressed twice by Hunt on whether he still supports defunding the police, El-Sayed did not directly answer. Instead, he said voters should judge him by his record running Wayne County’s Department of Health, Human and Veterans Services, saying he “funded the system because it needed to be funded.”
“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,” he added. “They’re not that effective, and nobody really asks me about them on the streets or in communities in Michigan. So, if you want to talk about housing or health care or corporate dominance in our politics, I think those are a lot more legitimate questions that people are actually asking me about what they want their next senator to do in the state of Michigan, rather than for clickbait in DC.”
The interview came after El-Sayed previously sought to distance himself from the slogan after CNN reported on his deleted tweets in November 2025.
In an interview with the Detroit News shortly after the article was published, 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.”
But the deleted tweets CNN reported show El-Sayed repeatedly embraced the substance of the defund movement, even when he framed it as “refunding” other public services. CNN tallied thousands of deleted tweets, including about a dozen in support of the “defund the police” movement.
“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.
Interviews echoed his tweets
El-Sayed’s deleted tweets were not his only public expressions of support for defunding the police.
Throughout 2020, he repeatedly endorsed some of the movement’s goals in interviews, speeches and writings, often describing them as shifting government resources away from policing and incarceration and toward public health, education and anti-poverty programs.
“The question becomes, where are the places that we as a society ought to invest? Should we be investing in militarized police — police that have military materiel — or should we be investing in mental health services, poverty reduction, food, walkability, higher-quality air and better access to water?” he said in November 2020 when speaking to a college group, according to the Manistee News Advocate, a local newspaper.
And in May 2021, El-Sayed wrote on his Substack that instead of having productive conversations to combat rising crime, the discussion “will likely reduce back to the debate about policing.”
“The irony of this is that those advocating for reductions in police budgets aren’t doing so in a vacuum: they’re advocating for those dollars to be invested in taking on exactly the same causes of insecurity that the pandemic exacerbated that underlie so many of its consequences, like crime,” he wrote. “Smaller police budgets mean more investment in housing, childcare, food assistance, and income support.”
An epidemiologist, El-Sayed often framed “systemic racism and police brutality” as a public health issue. In the summer of 2020, El-Sayed was a contributor in an online University of Michigan seminar on police brutality in America.
“So we have to ask ourselves, do police departments really need tanks and weapons of war and the materiel 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 said at the seminar.
He continued, “When we talk about the question of quote-un-quote ‘defunding the police,’ it’s a question of asking, how do we right-size government away from the racist ideologies that have led us to investing in war materiel for policing rather than public health for children?”
“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,” El-Sayed said in another 2020 local press interview.
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