Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says America’s tech capital has a police problem, and he’s welcoming President Donald Trump’s pitch to send National Guard troops to yet another Democrat-led city.
“We don’t have enough cops, so if they can be cops, I’m all for it,” Benioff toldThe New York Times on 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 that up, too.”
Benioff told The Times the city is short about 1,000 police officers and believes National Guard troops could help reduce the city’s crime.
The mayor’s office and the San Francisco Police Department didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Despite Benioff’s concerns, violent crime, property crime, and homicides in San Francisco have all fallen this year, and then-Mayor London Breed said in January the city’s crime rate was the lowest since 2001.
But Benioff isn’t convinced and will pay for hundreds of off-duty law enforcement officers when Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference starts Tuesday in downtown San Francisco, bringing 50,000 attendees to the city from over 140 countries.
“When you walk through San Francisco next week, there will be cops on every corner,” he told the Times. “That’s how it used to be.”
While Benioff thinks San Francisco needs to “re-fund” the police, the city has not defunded its police force, and its violent crime rates rank below rates of many other major cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, and New York.
Still, the city has had trouble recruiting and retaining officers, and struggles to contain lower-level crimes and open-air drug use.
Tech and Trump
Benioff’s comments come as he and other tech executives have been cozying up to the president since his re-election.
A few weeks ago, Benioff attended a state dinner for Trump that was 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’s doing,” he told The Times.
The owner of Time magazine, Benioff said he had been closely following news about immigration raids, Trump’s push to redraw congressional districts before midterms, the government shutdown and Trump’s attacks on the media, according to The Times.
“We haven’t been under attack,” he said. “We provide accurate, balanced journalism.”
Time named Trump its “Person of the Year” last year, about a month after he won the presidential election.
Meanwhile, Apple CEO Tim Cook gifted Trump a 24-karat gold stand 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 he was “a very refreshing change.”
