Abdul El-Sayed has touted endorsements from police unions in his Senate race against Mike Rogers, a former FBI agent. Did any of these unions bother digging into the Democrat nominee's track record on policing before issuing endorsements – including an attack on police unions?
Chuck Ross did the work at the Washington Free Beacon that the unions and Michigan media outlets overlooked. As it happens, El-Sayed has taken notable positions on policing, none of which points to being an ally. In one interview in 2021, El-Sayed says that police have never helped him, and in another from 2020, he called for American law enforcement to be disarmed entirely.
Ross has the receipts, too:
"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?"
The answer is: when we allowed criminals to have their way with us otherwise.
Law enforcement officers (LEOs) in the US have always been armed, and so have the constables and militias that preceded them. The need to prepare LEOs for high-risk operations has grown in various periods of unrest, but the real catalyst for superior firepower and defense was the 1997 armed robbery and shootout in North Hollywood, California. Two bank robbers wore body armor and carried automatic rifles, and outgunned the LAPD for nearly an hour. LAPD officers went to a nearby gun store to get high-powered rifles and ammunition to finally disable and kill the two robbers, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition were fired in the melee.
At least El-Sayed didn't call to defund the police, some might say. Except that El-Sayed said that as well, as Ross points out:
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. ...
“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.”
What about the police unions endorsing El-Sayed? He wants them declawed to eliminate their influence in politics:
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.
Oh, the irony.
Speaking of irony, the comment about police in the UK should get even more attention with recent events. The police in British cities have been ineffective at protecting girls from rape gangs run mainly by South Asian immigrants. They have also been forced to kowtow to Muslim mobs while doing little to protect Jews and Christians. Perhaps that's why El-Sayed prefers police to be disarmed; the mobs have an easier time taking control of the streets.
Maybe someone should talk to the Wayne County Deputy Sheriff’s Association, the union representing deputies in and around Detroit. Do they agree that their union's influence should be eliminated and their LEOs disarmed while on the job? If not, why did they endorse El-Sayed over Rogers, a candidate who has always supported law enforcement? Will any reporter bother to ask them to explain?
Editor’s Note: The 2026 Midterms will determine the fate of President Trump’s America First agenda. Republicans must maintain control of both chambers of Congress.
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