Abdul El-Sayed touts endorsements from police unions on his campaign website and says he will "work hand in hand with law enforcement" if elected to the Senate in Michigan. But in videos unearthed by the Washington Free Beacon, El-Sayed said his "heart races" out of fear when he sees cops, suggested that American police officers should not carry guns, and that it’s time to "rethink the power of police unions," which "sink their claws" into politicians.
The left-wing Democrat, who is poised to campaign this week with "Squad" leader Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, made the remarks on two podcasts in 2020 and 2021, the height of the "defund the police" era, also dubbed "Woke 1.0."
"In my experience, the police have never been out there to help me," El-Sayed said in a Feb. 15, 2021 interview, recounting a conversation with his grandfather, who told him, "The police are out there to help you."
"That’s never been my experience. So, when I see cops, when I get pulled over to this day, right, my heart races," said El-Sayed.
In an interview on June 17, 2020, El-Sayed recalled his experience living in England and suggested that American police officers should be unarmed like their British counterparts.
"We are the only country in the world that, um, allows our police to police us like they were a military. And I lived in the U.K. while I was in grad school, and in the U.K., their cops don't have guns," said El-Sayed, who studied at Oxford. "I think we really need to be asking when did we allow our police to turn into a military … that could have its way with us?"
El-Sayed also bemoaned the influence of police unions, asserting that they "scare" policymakers into opposing police reforms.
"We do have to rethink the power of police unions, we do have to rethink the ways that they’ve been able to sink their claws into politicians and scare them into any kind of action," he said.
Those remarks could reinforce Republican claims about El-Sayed’s "radical" views on policing and the criminal justice system. El-Sayed said in 2020 that "we do need to defund the police," CNN reported. He has also called for sending fewer people to jail and reducing the number of people currently in jail through controversial policies to end cash bail, and defer prosecutions on certain crimes.
El-Sayed’s half-sister, a University of Chicago professor, was arrested last year for spitting on an Illinois state trooper during an anti-ICE riot.
El-Sayed’s statements, especially his professed fear of cops, contrasts with his campaign trail rhetoric in the Michigan Senate race, one of the most bitter and expensive races in the country. El-Sayed is running against Mike Rogers, a former FBI special agent.
El-Sayed, the former health director of Wayne County, boasts of an endorsement from the Wayne County Deputy Sheriff’s Association on his campaign website and said he "worked hand in hand with law enforcement for safer, stronger communities."
"Public safety? Yeah, I get it," El-Sayed said in a YouTube ad that highlights the endorsement.
El-Sayed’s campaign began airing YouTube ads last week that features Wayne County executive Warren Evans, a former Detroit police chief who hired El-Sayed to his health director job in 2023. Evans, a former Wayne County deputy sheriff, claims in the ads that El-Sayed "supported our police and our sheriffs."
James Tignanelli, the president of the Police Officers Association of Michigan, called El-Sayed’s remarks "foolish" and a misunderstanding of what police unions seek on behalf of their members.
"If you want to have good people doing this job, you need to provide them some kind of benefits and some kind of protection. That’s what we do," said Tignanelli, whose organization oversees 372 law enforcement offices in Michigan, including the Wayne County Deputy Sheriff’s Association.
"We can’t walk off the job like the UAW," said Tignanelli, noting that police officers are prohibited under state law from going on strike.
El-Sayed, who bills himself "a card-carrying union member" of the National Writers Union and American Association of University Professors, has tried to distance himself during the campaign from his past anti-cop rhetoric.
He has deleted social media posts criticizing police, and said they were "taken out of context." He called his past remarks "dumb and unnuanced" in a recent interview, though still embraced the idea of reallocating money for police to other public services.
In his June 2020 interview, conducted with activist Trische’ Duckworth, El-Sayed talked through the rhetorical nuances of the discussion about "defunding" police.
"I don’t like the term ‘defund,’ because really I should be talking about refund," he said. "I think we should be refunding public health, I think we should be refunding recreation, I think we should be refunding public schools, we should be refunding libraries, we should be refunding public spaces."
"All of those funds that the police departments have eaten up, I think we’ve got to push them back to where they need to go," El-Sayed said.
"Abdul believes we absolutely need to give law enforcement the tools and resources they need to protect communities from violent crime," said El-Sayed campaign spokesman Cole Wozniak, who noted the endorsement from the Wayne County Deputy Sheriff's Association.
