In Deleted Tweets, William Lawrence Called to Defund the Lansing Police

For a guy with two unremarkable names, William Lawrence holds shocking beliefs that could threaten the safety of our 7th Congressional district, which he’s hoping to win in November.

Lawrence wrote in now-deleted tweets in 2020 and 2021 that he wants completely open borders and absolutely no police departments—especially in Lansing, despite a crime wave in the city that spiked during the pandemic.

For context, remember that Michiganders weren’t allowed to leave our houses for most of 2020 unless we were “essential workers” or marching through a closed-down city for a Black Lives Matter protest.

“Defund the police,” Lawrence wrote on May 31, 2020.

A few days later, Lawrence quote tweeted a post calling to defund the Minneapolis police and “build a new state.” He used flower emojis and a heart-eyed smiling face to signal his support.

On June 8, Lawrence lambasted Lansing Mayor Andy Schor for his suggestion to divest $100,000 away from the city’s police department and to the community.

“He's so tone-deaf!” Lawrence said of the mayor without a modicum of self-awareness.

On June 17, he praised Lansing’s state reps for voting against a House resolution urging cities in the state to fully fund local police departments.

“Glad to see Lansing-area reps Sarah Anthony and Julie Brixie voting against this resolution,” Lawrence wrote. “We are going to defund the Lansing police.”

By July, he was calling the strategy of the Defund the Police movement “brilliant” and said any city that employs cops would become a target of progressive ire for years.

Thankfully, city leadership didn’t listen to radicals like Lawrence, Anthony, or Brixie and decided to keep the police department budget stable, which may explain why the crime rate actually fell by 2022.

But Lawrence doesn’t believe funding the police has anything to do with it. In 2020, Lansing saw a 30% increase in violent crime like rape, homicide and aggravated assault.

The following year, Lawrence said the violence and lawlessness in the city actually showed the police department had outlived its usefulness.

In May 2021, Lawrence posted this mind-bending tweet: “man this crime wave is crazy huh, seems like cops are bad at stopping crime, hey i've got an idea, let's get rid of them and try something else.”

Instead of enforcing the law, Lawrence thinks the solution is to get rid of its enforcers completely in favor of the impossible-to-pin-down-policy known as “something else.”

Thankfully, Lansing sided with its police instead of whatever pie-in-the-sky program Lawrence and his ilk would have proposed as part of that “something else.”

The activist-turned-congressional candidate also wants a world where nobody is a citizen of any country and there are no borders.

“Envision a world of free and open migration,” Lawrence wrote in August 2021. “Our mission is the eradication of all forms of domination. National origin is one of the strongest fronts of domination in our world today.”

Envision that: Being an American makes you a dominant oppressor to those not from here. The only way to make it right for those poor saps is to remove any real definition of what it means to be an American to even the playing field.

Lawrence Williams—sorry, William Lawrence—is just another Reddit radical puffed up with his own ideas about how to change the world by dictative fiat rather than realistic improvements to the current system.

This ideological hubris connects progressive pipe dreamers. Buying into it has disastrous consequences in the real world.

The answer to rising crime is to enforce our laws, not completely destroy police departments. Let more people into America lawfully by expanding and improving the current immigration system, not deleting our borders.

We’ve seen what happens when cities are soft on crime—quality of life decreases for residents and businesses leave. We’ve seen what happens when we let anyone cross the border—criminals wander the streets of our cities.

William Lawrence’s vision of what Michigan could become would be disastrous for us.