Mayor Daniel Lurie speaks at a news conference at the San Francisco police academy on Wednesday.
Lea Suzuki/S.F. Chronicle
President Donald Trump on Wednesday indicated that he wanted to send federal troops to San Francisco, hours after Mayor Daniel Lurie and local law enforcement leaders pushed back on calls for the president to do just that.
Trump said at the White House that he was “strongly recommending” that his administration “start looking at San Francisco,” which he said had been “one of our great cities 10 years ago, 15 years ago.”
“Now it’s a mess,” Trump said as he turned to FBI Director Kash Patel. “We have great support in San Francisco, so I’d like to recommend that for inclusion, maybe, in your next group.”
The president’s comments sparked swift condemnation from state Sen. Scott Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat, who said any deployment to the city would be “a massive waste of taxpayer dollars and yet another step toward authoritarianism.” Gov. Gavin Newsom, meanwhile, highlighted Trump’s statement that the city was great 15 years ago, when Newsom was mayor, and said in a social media post, “why, thank you!”
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Earlier in the day, Lurie, District Attorney Brooke Jenkins and Sheriff Paul Miyamoto detailed their efforts to improve public safety at a news conference at the city’s police academy. They talked about an uptick in police recruitment, the city’s declining crime reports, and their partnerships with state and federal law enforcement agencies to fight drug trafficking.
They did not mention Trump by name, in keeping with Lurie’s preferred strategy of trying to avoid direct confrontations with the president. But the context was clear. Lurie’s news conference came less than one week after Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said Trump should send the National Guard to San Francisco, as the president has done in other cities.
Taken together, the remarks from the three elected officials were clearly intended to signal that San Francisco leaders are well equipped to manage the city’s public safety concerns and do not want Trump to intervene.
“We have a lot of work to do, but I trust our local law enforcement,” Lurie said. “We in San Francisco are doing the work each and every day, and I will continue to do the work 365 days a year alongside these great law enforcement partners that we have.”
Jenkins said that when San Francisco needs help from state or federal agencies, “we have no problem” asking for it, but local leaders “have this issue under control” right now.
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“I acknowledge, just like the mayor and the sheriff, there is still work to be done. None of us believe otherwise,” Jenkins said. “But we are committed to a solid and strong partnership and doing what it takes to get the job done. That partnership is fundamentally different than resources being imposed upon our communities.”
Miyamoto said “we absolutely have this in regards to public safety being handled by all of us here in San Francisco.”
Lurie, Jenkins and Miyamoto spoke hours after the San Francisco Police Department announced that it had seen four consecutive full classes at the police academy with a fifth expected to start in December, helping to grow the ranks of police officers for the first time in years. While the department remains hundreds of officers short of its recommended staffing level, entry-level applications are up 40% and 195 officers applied from other jurisdictions so far this year, SFPD said.
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office also aligned himself with Lurie’s narrative in a Wednesday news release that said the city has seen large decreases in both violent crime and robberies since 2019. Newsom further highlighted his administration’s efforts to help San Francisco disrupt its open-air drug markets and combat organized retail theft in the Bay Area.
Benioff, in an interview with the New York Times published Friday, kicked off a wave of public debate about whether Trump should order the National Guard to San Francisco in a continuation of the controversial crackdowns in liberal cities that he’s already attempted in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Chicago and Portland.
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“We don’t have enough cops, so if they can be cops, I’m all for it,” Benioff told the Times, despite the fact that federal law bars U.S. troops from enforcing criminal laws in most cases.
Lurie told reporters Wednesday that he had spoken to Benioff recently, and while the mayor declined to detail “private conversations,” he said he told Benioff that “we are working relentlessly every day” to improve public safety and grow police staffing. Benioff’s comments were made on the eve of Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference, which brings tens of thousands of visitors to San Francisco annually.
“I am now focused on what I can control,” Lurie said. Some San Francisco leaders have previously questioned Lurie’s approach to Trump and said they wished he would take a more forceful stand against the president.
Benioff, who has embraced Trump, tried to soften his stance days after the Times interview and announced that Salesforce would give $1 million to “support larger hiring bonuses for new police officers” in San Francisco. By that point, however, his original idea had already been endorsed by prominent figures such as Elon Musk, who called federal intervention in San Francisco “the only solution at this point.”
Jenkins was among the most vocal San Francisco politicians to push back on Benioff’s comments to the Times, writing on social media that Trump had “turned so-called public safety and immigration enforcement into a form of government-sponsored violence against U.S. citizens, families, and ethnic groups.”
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Her office later sent out a media advisory for a news conference she planned to hold Wednesday morning at City Hall. The news conference was intended for Jenkins and local civic and corporate leaders to “reject and denounce calls for the National Guard to be sent to San Francisco,” the advisory said. A separate online form encouraging supporters to attend that event said Jenkins and other officials would “protest the National Guard’s potential invasion of San Francisco,” urging allies to stand against “authoritarian overreach.”
But the news conference was canceled, and Jenkins instead went to the police academy with Lurie and Miyamoto.
“The location doesn’t matter. We wanted to show what we’re doing in San Francisco,” Jenkins said. “It’s more important that people see across the country what we’re committed to. And the commitment is to enforcing order in our streets, in our businesses, with our visitors, with our residents and making sure that people see the strong show of law enforcement in this city.”
