Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says America’s tech capital has a policing problem and he welcomes President Donald Trump’s proposal to send National Guard troops to another Democratic-led city.
“We don’t have enough cops, so if they can be cops, I’m all for it,” Benioff said. The New York Times Friday.
Trump has already sent troops to Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. and Memphis, but courts have blocked attempts to deploy troops to Chicago and Portland.
In August, he mentioned he was considering sending troops to San Francisco, adding that Democrats had “destroyed” the city and that his administration would “clean it up, too.”
Benioff said The times the city is short about 1,000 police officers and believes National Guard troops could help reduce crime in the city.
The mayor’s office and San Francisco police did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Despite Benioff’s concerns, violent crime, property crime and homicides in San Francisco all declined this year, and then-Mayor London Breed said in January that the city’s crime rate was the lowest since 2001.
But Benioff isn’t convinced and will pay for hundreds of furloughed law enforcement officers when Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference kicks off Tuesday in downtown San Francisco, drawing 50,000 attendees from more than 140 countries to the city.
“When you drive through San Francisco next week, there will be cops on every corner,” he told the newspaper. Times. “It was like this before.”
While Benioff believes San Francisco needs to “refund” the police, the city has not defunded its police force and its violent crime rates are lower than many other major cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston and New York.
Yet the city struggles to recruit and retain officers, and struggles to contain low-level crime and open drug use.
Technology and Trump
Benioff’s comments come as he and other tech executives have grown closer to the president since his re-election.
A few weeks ago, Benioff attended a state dinner for Trump hosted by King Charles at Windsor Castle in England — where he apparently spent the dinner telling the president “how grateful I am for everything he does,” he said. Time.
The owner of Time magazine, Benioff said he was closely following news about immigration raids, Trump’s efforts to redraw congressional districts before the midterms, the government shutdown and Trump’s attacks on the media, according to The times.
“We were not attacked,” he said. “We provide accurate and balanced journalism.”
Time Trump was named “Person of the Year” last year, about a month after winning the presidential election.
Meanwhile, Apple CEO Tim Cook presented Trump with a 24-karat gold holder during a visit to the Oval Office in August. Last month, the White House hosted a dinner for a long list of tech titans, including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft’s Bill Gates. There, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Trump it was a “very refreshing change.”
