El-Sayed is running as a Democrat in Michigan against Republican Mike Rogers, a former FBI special agent. He is a former Wayne County health director and bills himself as a card-carrying union member. He is also set to appear on the trail with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Podcast clips show a harder line on cops

On June 17, 2020, activist Trische’ Duckworth interviewed El-Sayed. He compared U.S. policing to a military model and pointed to his time living in the United Kingdom while in graduate school at Oxford.

El-Sayed said American police were uniquely armed and empowered in ways he rejected.

"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."

He went further on the same theme.

"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?"

He also took aim at police unions. He said their political power needed a hard second look.

"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."

El-Sayed disliked the word “defund.” He preferred another frame: “refund.” He said money that police departments had “eaten up” should move back to public health, recreation, schools, libraries, and public spaces.

"I don’t like the term ‘defund,’ because really I should be talking about refund. 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."

CNN later reported that in 2020 he also said, “we do need to defund the police.”

Heart racing at a traffic stop

Months later, on Feb. 15, 2021, El-Sayed offered a personal account of how he viewed officers. He said police had never been there for him. He said his heart still raced when he got pulled over.

"In my experience, the police have never been out there to help me. That’s never been my experience. So, when I see cops, when I get pulled over to this day, right, my heart races."

He recalled his grandfather telling him the opposite, that police were out there to help. El-Sayed said that had not been his experience.

Campaign ads sell a different Abdul

Fast forward to the Senate race. El-Sayed’s campaign website touts an endorsement from the Wayne County Deputy Sheriff’s Association. He says that if elected he will “work hand in hand with law enforcement.”

Last week his campaign began airing YouTube ads featuring Warren Evans, the Wayne County executive. Evans is a former Detroit police chief and former Wayne County deputy sheriff. He hired El-Sayed as county health director in 2023. In the ads, Evans says El-Sayed “supported our police and our sheriffs.”

Campaign spokesman Cole Wozniak gave the present-day line after the older clips drew scrutiny.

"Abdul believes we absolutely need to give law enforcement the tools and resources they need to protect communities from violent crime."

El-Sayed has also tried to bag the past. He deleted social media posts critical of police and said they were “taken out of context.” In a recent interview he called older remarks “dumb and unnuanced.” He still backed shifting police money toward other services.

Union president calls the old talk foolish

James Tignanelli is president of the Police Officers Association of Michigan. The group oversees 372 law enforcement offices in the state, including the Wayne County Deputy Sheriff’s Association that endorsed El-Sayed.

Tignanelli called El-Sayed’s earlier remarks foolish and said they misread what police unions do. Officers in Michigan cannot strike under state law, he noted. Unions exist to keep decent people in a hard job.

"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. We can’t walk off the job like the UAW."

Family arrest and a soft-on-crime record

The Free Beacon also noted a family flashpoint. 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.

On policy, El-Sayed has called for sending fewer people to jail and cutting the jail population. He has backed ending cash bail and deferring prosecutions on certain crimes. Those are the same kind of reforms that left cities struggling with repeat offenders after 2020.

He can call old sound bites clumsy. Voters still get to weigh the full tape. A candidate who once treated armed police as a standing threat, and who wanted their budgets opened up for “refunds” elsewhere, now wants Michiganders to trust him as a partner to the men and women who answer 911.

Michigan families living with carjackings, retail theft, and empty police shifts do not need another lecture from Oxford about unarmed cops. They need leaders who back the badge when it counts, not only when a sheriff’s endorsement is useful on the trail.