I will never forgive Marc Benioff for making me side with Ron Conway.
“I have expressed candidly to you, repeatedly, in recent days, that I am shocked and disappointed by your comments calling for an unwanted invasion of San Francisco by federal troops,” Mr. Conway wrote in the email, “and by your willful ignorance and detachment from the impacts of the ICE immigration raids of families with NO criminal record.” […]
“Your obsession with and constant annual threats to move Dreamforce to Las Vegas is ironic, since it is a fact that Las Vegas has a higher rate of violent crime than San Francisco,” Mr. Conway wrote. “San Francisco does not need a federal invasion because you don’t like paying for extra security for Dreamforce.”
How much does Salesforce pay to SFPD? Less than you’d think:
Following an uproar, Benioff backpedaled on his call to send in the troops, saying he only wanted to aid San Francisco’s understaffed police force. He also added that Salesforce paid for an additional 200 off-duty law-enforcement officers to essentially work Dreamforce security.
But how much does Salesforce pay? The amount the company spent on San Francisco officers was about $1 million in overtime costs over the past 18 months, according to invoices obtained in a public records request.
Last year, Salesforce grossed just shy of $35 billion. That $1 million outlay represents 0.02 percent of the company’s net income of $4.1 billion.
The payments were made through the city’s 10(b) program, in which private employers can hire off-duty officers as security. Between 2018 and 2023, Salesforce was a top-five employer of off-duty San Francisco cops, paying for 30,911 hours of overtime work. That’s more than Target, Safeway or Bank of America but less than Lululemon, the Giants or the No. 1 10(b) employer, Walgreen’s. […]
But Benioff bemoaning current private security costs puzzled law-enforcement sources, who noted that Salesforce has been staffed by a host of San Francisco police officers for years. These hefty deployments, including SWAT teams, counter-sniper teams, plainclothes officers and roaming and fixed-post patrol officers, came whether the department was fully staffed or, as in the present, understaffed. […]
Officers Mission Local spoke with rejected the notion of bringing in the National Guard – which, by law, cannot undertake the duties of local police.
“A local cop is beholden to the rules and regulations of the city they work for,” said one. He is not ordered to “‘go grab Brown people’ or ‘go beat up hippies.’”
But his allegiance to Mr. Trump goes much further:
Screenshots of internal documents and communications obtained by The New York Times show that Salesforce has pitched Immigration and Customs Enforcement on using the company’s artificial intelligence capabilities to help ICE staff up as Mr. Trump expands immigration raids and deportations around the country.
Surely now people will stop with this “good billionaire” bullshit. There are no good billionaires. It is a mathematical impossibility. If they were good people they would not be billionaires. We’re probably only 18 months away from Taylor Swift going off about “blood and soil”.
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