Michigan Democrat Deleted Tweets About Defunding the Police

(AP Photo/Paul Sancya)

A Michigan Democrat seeking his party’s nomination for the U.S. Senate scrubbed his past support for defunding the police from his X account, CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck found.

“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,” declared Abdul El-Sayed in 2020.

“The police have become standing armies we deploy against our own people,” read another one of the thousands of tweets deleted by the progressive Democrat, who was also a CNN contributor at one point.

From Kaczynski and Steck’s report:

A CNN KFile review of comments El-Sayed made from 2020 to 2021 found he repeatedly
said US police departments were overfunded and promoted what he called the “refund
movement” — a plan to redirect taxpayer money from police budgets to social services for schools, libraries, parks and clinics.

A CNN tally of his deleted tweets found he posted about a dozen times in support of the
“defund the police” movement.

Past versions of El-Sayed’s campaign website during his failed run for governor in 2018 also included a 20-page policy document on criminal justice reforms. The proposal offers a litany of progressive policies, including improving police training and accountability, prison and sentencing reform, ending cash bail, hiring more public defenders, and assisting recently released prisoners.

Other tweets from El-Sayed submitted that “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,” and “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 material for policing rather than public health for children?”