Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says America’s tech capital has a police drawback, and he’s welcoming President Donald Trump’s pitch to ship Nationwide Guard troops to one more Democrat-led metropolis.
“We don’t have enough cops, so if they can be cops, I’m all for it,” Benioff instructed The New York Occasions on Friday.
Trump has already despatched troops to Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Memphis, however courts have blocked makes an attempt to deploy troops to Chicago and Portland.
In August, he talked about he was contemplating sending troops to San Francisco, including that Democrats had “destroyed” town and that his administration would “clean that up, too.”
Benioff instructed The Occasions town is brief about 1,000 cops and believes Nationwide Guard troops may assist cut back town’s crime.
The mayor’s workplace and the San Francisco Police Division didn’t instantly reply to requests for remark.
Regardless of Benioff’s considerations, violent crime, property crime, and homicides in San Francisco have all fallen this yr, and then-Mayor London Breed mentioned in January town’s crime fee was the bottom since 2001.
However Benioff isn’t satisfied and pays for lots of of off-duty regulation enforcement officers when Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce convention begins Tuesday in downtown San Francisco, bringing 50,000 attendees to town from over 140 international locations.
“When you walk through San Francisco next week, there will be cops on every corner,” he instructed the Occasions. “That’s how it used to be.”
Whereas Benioff thinks San Francisco must “re-fund” the police, town has not defunded its police drive, and its violent crime charges rank under charges of many different main cities, together with Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, and New York.
Nonetheless, town has had hassle recruiting and retaining officers, and struggles to include lower-level crimes and open-air drug use.
Tech and Trump
Benioff’s feedback come as he and different tech executives have been cozying as much as the president since his re-election.
A number of weeks in the past, Benioff attended a state dinner for Trump that was hosted by King Charles at Windsor Fortress in England—the place he apparently spent the dinner telling the president “how grateful I am for everything he’s doing,” he instructed The Occasions.
“We haven’t been under attack,” he mentioned. “We provide accurate, balanced journalism.”
Time named Trump its “Person of the Year” final yr, a couple of month after he received the presidential election.
In the meantime, Apple CEO Tim Prepare dinner gifted Trump a pure gold stand throughout a go to to the Oval Workplace in August. Final month, the White Home hosted a dinner for a protracted checklist of tech titans, together with Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft’s Invoice Gates. There, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman instructed Trump he was “a very refreshing change.”
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