On Thursday’s broadcast of CNN’s “The Arena,” Democratic Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed said that he should be judged by actions funding juvenile detention employees and not tweets he deleted in support of defunding them and “I deleted all the tweets because I didn’t want them to be taken out of context like this so that you could distract from the actual conversation that Michiganders really want to have about what they want their leadership to actually fight for them to do.”
Host Kasie Hunt asked, “I also wanted to ask you about some of the tweets that you deleted as you were in the course of this race, just before, around this question of defunding the police, this is also something likely to come up in a general election, should you win this primary. Do you stand by what you had previously said, that police — in support of defunding the police, or do you believe police should be funded?”
El-Sayed responded, “So, Kasie, in my time leading Wayne County’s Department of Health, Human and Veteran Services, I had the responsibility of rebuilding a juvenile detention facility. I raised salaries 35% for workers there to make sure that the public health emergency that we had to call no longer existed. So, judge me by my work, rather than some deleted tweets –.”
Hunt then cut in to ask, “Why did you delete the tweets?”
El-Sayed answered, “I deleted all the tweets because I didn’t want them to be taken out of context like this so that you could distract from the actual conversation that Michiganders really want to have about what they want their leadership to actually fight for them to do.”
Hunt then said, “Well, I think the question is just, if you’re leading, would you fight to defund the police or would you not?”
El-Sayed responded, “I’ve already told you what I did, judge me by my work. I funded the system because it needed to be funded. Too often, the conversation we have is fund or defund. The question that we don’t ask is what kind of system do we really want? I want us to be investing in the kinds of interventions that actually protect people, whether you’re talking about people on the streets or people in law enforcement. That means investing in recruitment and retirement for law enforcement. It also means investing in community violence intervention, investing in behavioral health response, investing in public health and anti-poverty measures. Those are things that are not mutually exclusive. And I think this debate about 2020 and the ways that tweets are going to play [is] really nice on CNN, if you want to get clicks. They’re not that effective, and nobody really asks me about them on the streets or in communities in Michigan. So, if you want to talk about housing or healthcare or corporate dominance in our politics, I think those are a lot more legitimate questions that people are actually asking me about what they want their next senator to do in the state of Michigan rather than for clickbait in D.C.”
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