During a Cabinet meeting Thursday, President Donald Trump praised San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie but implied the city could not truly get a handle on crime without federal intervention.
Alex Brandon/Associated Press
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump mused again on Thursday about sending a federal presence to San Francisco to tackle crime, publicly urging Mayor Daniel Lurie to let his administration help San Francisco become “a great city again.”
During a Cabinet meeting, Trump praised Lurie for trying to get San Francisco’s crime under control. But he implied that Lurie would not be able to finish the job without federal intervention because immigrants are responsible for the lawlessness — a claim contradicted by decades of research.
“I know they have a mayor who’s trying very hard,” Trump said. “He’s a Democrat, but he’s trying very hard. But we can do it much more effectively, because he can’t do what we do. He can’t take people out from the city and bring them back to the country from where they came.”
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Trump previously considered deploying the National Guard to San Francisco in October, as he had already done in Los Angeles and several other cities across the country, amid an immigration crackdown that included surging hundreds of federal agents into the Bay Area.
After intervention from local tech leaders, and a call with Lurie where Trump asked his political affiliation, the president called off the plan and pledged to give San Francisco a chance to turn itself around.
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Reported crime dropped to historic lows in most of San Francisco last year and has been falling faster than other major cities nationwide, where both violent and property crimes are generally on the decline.
But that is apparently not enough for Trump, who said Thursday that San Francisco has “a lot of crime” and also “tremendous, tremendous potential.” He expressed impatience with Lurie and the pace of the city’s progress.
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“I had friends calling me up from San Francisco, ‘Could you give him a chance? ’ I said, ‘Absolutely. If you want, I’ll give him a chance,’” Trump said. “He’s trying, he’s doing OK. We could make it a lot safer than it is. San Francisco, a great city, was a great city, could quickly become a great city again. But they’re going very slowly.”
Lurie contested that characterization in an unrelated interview with the Chronicle on Thursday, where he reiterated some of his familiar talking points about San Francisco’s turnaround.
“This goes back to what I told the president in the one conversation that I had with him last year: Our city is on the rise,” Lurie said. “What we’re doing is working.”
Lurie said he was “very confident” in the ability of local police to keep San Francisco safe and maintain order on the streets.
“We will partner with state and federal authorities when it comes to enforcing the law around dealing fentanyl and the drugs on our streets (and) around issues of terror,” he said. “We were working in partnership with state and federal officials around the Super Bowl. We will do that for the World Cup (too), and I will leave it at that.”
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Though Lurie has repeatedly said he welcomes more coordination on addressing drug crime, neither San Francisco nor the federal government appear to be pushing for new operations. During his first official trip to Washington, D.C., in January, Lurie did not attempt to meet with Trump administration officials and he told the Chronicle that he had not engaged in any further discussions about beefing up partnerships with the FBI and U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency to disrupt open-air drug markets or go after fentanyl dealers.
The president’s latest comments about San Francisco came as he lamented that Chicago had not asked for his help following the recent murder of a Loyola University Chicago student, which local authorities have charged an undocumented immigrant with committing.
Trump pointed to a crime task force he sent to Memphis last fall — hundreds of federal agents and National Guard troops that he has credited for fixing a murder crisis.
“We could do that for Chicago, we could do that for New York, we could do that for L.A., and we could do that for, frankly, San Francisco,” he said. “We do things that they can’t do.”