Benioff retreats from idea of sending troops in to clean up San Francisco San Francisco’s political establishment rounded on Marc Benioff over the weekend after the Salesforce founder backed the idea of sending in the National Guard to clean up the city’s streets. By late Sunday Benioff took to Twitter to clarify that he believed the best people to manage public safety in San Francisco was… San …
“We don’t have cops, so if they can be cops, I’m all for it,”
Well even if he is "all for it", neither the National Guard nor the regular armed forces can just jump in and start policing San Francisco.
There's a little thing called the Posse Comitatus Act; https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/posse-comitatus-act-explained, that bans soldiers, marines etc from doing the job of the police.
Trump doesn't seem to understand that but he is being schooled by federal judges in Los Angeles, Portland and Chicago.
Benioff might not want to pay out for extra policing but drafting in armed troops is not the way that things are done.
Mostly no, but there have been some serious exceptions. See the secret bombings and invasions of Cambodia and Laos, Watergate, and Iran-Contra just off the top of my head. Anybody noticing a pattern here? If you have something of equal disregard for the law and the Constitution please add them. I have witnessed them all and nothing, absolutely nothing compares to the blatant, in your face and up your ass lawlessness and corruption of the current regime. The hypocrisy of crying about imagined weaponization from the previous administration compared to the openly obvious weaponization by the current regime is enough to make any sane person long for at least two (see no evil, hear no evil) of the three monkey solution.
And don't add any of the "lawfare" Bovine Squeezings from the most prolific liar in US political history. Trump was caught red handed hiding stolen documents, some of them classified. He tried to extort Ukraine to manufacture dirt or at least to say they were investigating a rival candidate and the State of Georgia to "find" more votes (did anybody other than JD check out the couch cushions?). He tried and failed to block the lawful transfer of power using violent and hateful rhetoric to incite the violence that did occur*, and he was indited and convicted by UNANIMOUS votes in the grand jury and trial jury of 34 felony counts. All of these have ample evidence to convict him on all charges. At yet here he sits on his golden throne squeezing out more greasy black venom as he types his incoherent babblings and unlawful edicts onto the internet causing untold havoc across the entire United States. Aided and abetted by his gaggle of nobhopper "republicans" in congress, the Supine Court, and the 10's of millions of MAGAs that support him as they all sing in unison, "owning the libs, winning, winning, winning, please sir may I have another". So far we are holding on only by the hair on our chinny chin chins, I guess now was a bad time to shave my beard.
* the "go peacefully" so often used to lie about his rhetoric on that day occurred almost three hours after it started. Before the beginning it was "fight like hell".
Nah, its a pretty good observation about life in contemporary America.
There's not really a whole lot the military can do that the police can't. They lack the intelligence infrastructure to do effective day to day policing. They can help out with logistics following a natural disaster and supplement law enforcement if there's large scale rioting but they have to be working under the auspices of law enforcement to be effective and so far they're just not wanted. (The most effective use of National Guard troops in DC, for example, has been trash pickup.)
What I find puzzling is that we've heard all sorts of justifications over the years for widespread weapons ownership from organized groups like the NRA such as "You need them to push back against government if it becomes oppressive" but when we get obvious governmental overreach we don't hear a peep from them. I personally think its because the real gun nuts are in reality a very small minority -- most Americans just don't feel the need to carry weapons -- and that minority has largely been recruited by ICE (Despite an apparently unlimited budget and a flood of applicants ICE is actually rather selective about who it hires -- and its not because it has high hiring standards.)
Yeah, and quite interestingly, there was also back then a dubious "narrative about falling property values and rising crime that were the nexus that, for white people [in the Detroit region], made the policing strategies acceptable". Policing in the style of (based on Ron Scott's account): "Nigger, if you breathe I'll blow your head off".
Is that what Benioff wants (and the White House), a return to racist white police officers (or the contemporary equivalent relative to whomever is currently disfavored by real estate flip artists) and related brutality, steamrolled through via military action?!
Salesforce's "Dreamforce" event is a private event not open to the public. Is there any reason why the City & County of San Francisco should provide security for free? Also, if you _can_ hire 200 off-duty cops, that sort of suggests that there are at least 200 cops available for emergencies of any kind...
All of this two-faced drooling boot-licking crap is getting tedious. Sure, these companies have to walk a tightrope, but their public statements waft around just as much as Trump's brain farts. Never going to change. All corporations are going to suck up to whichever party is in power. Depressing reality.
There is performative dick sucking to keep Trump off your back like most of them are doing, and there is openly sucking his dick in front of the entire world. If Salesforce was a consumer products company I'd quit buying their products just to avoid giving that turd any of my hard earned money. However, since they don't sell to me I can hope that he loses a few sales from big companies whose leaders don't make a big deal out of it because they don't want to upset the orange pedo, but choose to spend their company's money with someone else.
Yes, in other countries private security services also exist, but are typically not employing off-duty law enforcement personnel.
So police officers in the US seem to be paid so low, that many of them need a second (or third job).
Cops are paid absurdly well. A probationary deputy in my county gets 50k a year for a starting wage (now being moved to 60k "due to inflation"), while a fresh Sergeant can pull 90k. That doesn't even count the overtime fraud they commit by idling in a parking garage. Or by taking security jobs which get paid more because they can use their police powers to effect an arrest.
Mind, the median household income in florida is $40k.
From "Bandana Resources: How Much Do SFPD Officers Make?", which is recruiting for the SFPD: As an SFPD recruit in the academy, you start with an annual salary of $112,398, equating to approximately $53.89 per hour. This competitive starting pay makes SFPD one of the highest-paying law enforcement agencies in the Bay Area, ensuring you’re financially supported from day one. ... Salaries for SFPD officers increase significantly with experience and tenure. After seven years of service, officers earn $164,164 per year, which is approximately $68.65 per hour. With average overtime (7 hours a week), officers can expect total compensation of around $201,663 annually. For the top 10% of earners, total compensation, including overtime, can exceed $288,887 per year.
Enrty level in a major city is pretty low pay, 40-50k first couple of years which is pretty much poverty level in any major city. It does ramp up to 125k by the time you survive 5-6 years on the job though, which a lot of folks never do.
So, the off-duty cops are almost all the least trained and least experienced, until you get to the career cops that are divorced and do it because they've got problems and want to take it out on a random person every once in a while now that their wife is gone and they can't take it out on them.
Not really a great situation honestly anywhere that has to do it.
San Francisco has some of the most expensive real estate in the world, and most of the city's land area is zoned exclusively for single-family homes at a typical maximum height of 2 stories.
Tourists in San Francisco generally spend their time in the northeastern half of the city, whose development largely predates WWII -- by contrast, nearly the entire southwestern half of the city was built out in the immediate post-WWII era as a vast uninterrupted tract of near-identical, builder-grade, low-density houses, whose suburban-style qualities were reportedly part of the original inspiration for the Malvina Reynolds song "Little Boxes".
If San Francisco and the surrounding cities were built in the style of a first-rank European metro area, with districts consisting largely of 4-6 story mixed-use buildings and densely-packed narrow townhomes/flats, the city's homelessness crisis would look vastly different.
Mentally ill drug addicts exist pretty much anywhere on Earth, the main difference is that in San Francisco it's exceptionally hard for them to afford a place to live.
If you start pumping lethal levels of carbon monoxide into a room full of people, the first people to suffocate to death will probably be the ones with preexisting asthma. What would you describe as the root cause of death by suffocation: the asthma, or the carbon monoxide?
" open air drug taking "
Maybe both main US political parties need compulsory and continuous drug testing at all levels, right down to local mayors and sheriffs and deputies. And right up to the top.
And all the business people and lawyers they meet. And media people.
That'll take the sting out of the US drug market.
D.C. already saw the benefits of the National Guard coming in. We need that success in several of these major cities.With all the leftist attacks on the police, recruiting new officers is down. A lot of cities don't have enough police to protect their citizens. Democrats cut the funding instead, it leave the National Guard as the only option left.
> the benefits of the National Guard coming in.
Yep. They mulched gardens on public property, they did general clean-up and tidy-up work here and there. Most of it was on the level of a high-school kid's public-service project, only carried out by adults in uniform. If you weren't in an area of Washington, DC, that is recognizably so on a TV screen, you wouldn't have seen the guard.
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