San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie is pushing back against President Donald Trump’s proposal to send federal troops to the city, saying crime is down under his watch and that local officials have the situation under control.
Lurie, speaking at the San Francisco Police Department’s academy in Diamond Heights this week, praised a reduction in reported crimes and a growing number of police recruits in 2025.
“I’m not trying to change those people’s minds,” Lurie said about San Francisco’s critics. “They’re entitled to their own opinions, but they’re not entitled to their own facts.”
Crime is down in the Northern California city 30% compared to 2024 while the number of homicides is on track to be the lowest in 70 years. The number of police officers patrolling the streets has increased for the first time since the pandemic, though the force is still 500 shy of its staffing goal.
“We are moving in the right direction and will continue to prioritize safety and hiring while San Francisco law enforcement works every single day to keep our city safe,” the mayor’s office said in a statement.
The crime statistics seem to contradict the storm Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff created when he told the New York Times that he backed Trump and thought National Guard troops should be deployed to San Francisco, where Salesforce is located, to help prevent crime.
Benioff himself spends most of his time in Hawaii. The tech titan has since walked back those comments, but the damage, some say, has been done.
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“I’m going to be strongly recommending at the request of government officials, which is always nice, that you start looking at San Francisco,” Trump said at a press conference with FBI Director Kash Patel. “I think we can make San Francisco — one of our great cities 10 years ago, 15 years ago, and now it’s a mess.
“And we have great support in San Francisco, so I’d like to recommend that for inclusion, maybe in your next group,” Trump added to Patel.
Trump’s comments have enraged outspoken city leaders like District Attorney Brooke Jenkins who posted on social media: “I can’t be silent any longer.”
She tagged Trump and Homeland Security head Kristi Noem on X and said they “have turned so-called public safety and immigration enforcement into a form of government-sponsored violence against U.S. citizens, families, and ethnic groups.
“I am responsible for holding criminals accountable, and that includes holding government and law enforcement officials too, when they cross the bounds of the law,” Jenkins continued. “Let me be clear. If you come to San Francisco and illegally harass our residents, use excessive force or cross any other boundaries that the law proscribes, I will not hesitate to do my job and hold you accountable just like I do other violators of the law every single day.”
Democratic State Sen. Scott Wiener (D-CA), whose district covers the city, posted on X: “San Francisco neither needs nor wants Trump’s personal army on our streets. Contrary to Trump’s lie, no ‘government officials’ here have requested federal occupation. We don’t need Trump’s authoritarian crackdown in our city. Bottom line: Stay the hell out of San Francisco.”
Lurie hasn’t been as outspoken as others but it’s also not a huge surprise.
He didn’t comment when Trump sent the National Guard to to crack down on protests in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Portland. He was also quiet when Trump said he would send troops to Democratic strongholds to fight “a war from within.”
“The Mayor’s not exactly known as an antagonizer or a bomb thrower so he isn’t going to use soaring resistance language towards the President,” Jeff Le, former deputy Cabinet secretary to Democratic California Gov. Jerry Brown, told the Washington Examiner. “His campaign and mayoral term has been laser-focused on public safety so having troops in San Francisco implies that he’s lost control — that’s a non-starter.”
Keally McBride, a politics professor at the University of San Francisco, told KQED that she had hoped Lurie’s keep quiet approach “would mean that San Francisco would dodge the ire of Donald Trump, and that his affiliation with the tech industry leaders would help in that regard.”
Political strategist Kaivan Shroff told the Washington Examiner he thinks the smart approach would be to call out Benioff’s hypocrisy.
“Either the city is safe enough for his massive 40,000+ Dreamforce conference or…it’s not,” Shroff said. “Since I was just there and walked by those giant Dreamforce rainbows in the middle of the street…I’m gonna go with it’s safe enough. Folks should be alarmed that a group of oligarchs is directing where Trump wants to send the National Guard. Lurie doesn’t seem eager to make this a fight about Trump, but I’ll be looking to see how Newsom jumps in here. Is this going to be round 2 after the back and forth (still ongoing) in LA?”
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Benioff’s remarks have drawn backlash beyond City Hall, including from those closest to his company.
On Thursday, venture capitalist Ron Conway, known as the “godfather of Silicon Valley,” resigned from the board of Salesforce’s philanthropic arm where he had been a member for a decade, citing Benioff’s comments about San Francisco.