(NewsNation) — President Donald Trump said San Francisco could be next as part of his administration’s ongoing crackdown on crime.
On Wednesday, Trump announced he would be “strongly recommending” that action be taken to address crime in the California city. He has previously expressed interest in tackling crime in San Francisco and has even suggested reopening Alcatraz — the long-shuttered prison on an island in San Francisco Bay — to house America’s “most ruthless and violent” criminals.
“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,” Trump said. “Every American deserves to live in a community where they’re not afraid of being mugged, murdered, robbed, raped, assaulted, or shot.”
Trump’s comments were met with pushback from city and state officials who argue that crime is down. San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie pointed to declining crime rates in a press release Wednesday, noting that crime in the city “is down nearly 30%, car break-ins are at 22-year lows, and homicides are at 70-year lows.”
“We know it doesn’t stop at the National Guard. It continues with other types of enforcement, but to see tear gas and all the things that are happening, we don’t want that type of civil unrest or chaos here,” Brooke Jenkins, the District Attorney of San Francisco said. “Our job is to keep order in our streets, and right now, San Franciscans trust us to get that job done.”
Trump’s interest in San Francisco comes as he continues to clash with Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker over the deployment of National Guard troops in Chicago. This comes amid ongoing protests outside an ICE processing facility near the city, where demonstrators have at times clashed violently with federal agents. It’s part of a broader debate over crime, immigration and the constitutionality of deploying the National Guard in U.S. cities without a governor’s approval.
“This effort to deploy troops in American cities is not normal. There is no rational justification for such a deployment,” Governor Pritzker said. “It is a breach of the most fundamental values and customs that our armed forces operate on.”
Trump maintains intervention is needed to clean up crime in Chicago and other cities.
“If we didn’t have to fight all of these radical left governors, we could have had Chicago taken care, as an example,” Trump said. “They had, in a short period of time, 4,000 murders in Chicago and we have to listen to this man stand up and say that we are bad people.”