WATCH: Surfaced videos of Dem Senate candidate backing 'defund the police' contradict recent denials

By Fox News · Fox News

The front-runner in Michigan’s messy Democratic primary has repeatedly said he never called for defunding the police, but unearthed interviews and video from years earlier tell a different story. Abdul El-Sayed, who is running for the Democratic nomination in Michigan against Rep. Haley Stevens, D-Mich., has been adamant throughout his push for the Senate that he never wanted to strip tax dollars from police departments, going so far as to say he deleted old tweets embracing the ideology. But in a video for the University of Michigan published five years ago titled, "Systemic Racism as a Public Health Issue," El-Sayed argued that funding police and their use of force was a facet of systemic racism and constituted a public health issue. DEMOCRATS' CIVIL WAR HEADS TO MICHIGAN, WHERE PROGRESSIVES FACE BIGGEST TEST YET IN HIGH-STAKES SENATE SHOWDOWN "Why are we investing so much in people with guns and less in people with the means of being able to invest in young folks, empower folks through their livelihoods, and empower them to live their best lives?" El-Sayed questioned. "Do police really need to use guns? Do we need as much of a police force?" he continued. "And so, if we ask ourselves about how we spend money in the public, where that money goes, where it comes from, we need to make a lot better decisions about investing in the things that root out poverty, rather than investing in policing poverty." The video follows a report from CNN that found during the height of the "defund the police" movement in 2020, El-Sayed leaned into it. During an interview with Detroit Public Radio from June 2020, El-Sayed argued that he never directly called to "defund the police," but he contended that the principles behind the movement were difficult to express online in a tweet. MICHIGAN SENATE CANDIDATE CONFRONTED REPEATEDLY OVER ISRAEL’S RIGHT TO EXIST, DEFUNDING THE POLICE "So, you’ll note, I didn’t say ‘defund the police,’ I just described what needed to be done," El-Sayed sa…