Reverberations continued today following Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s call last week to sic the National Guard on San Francisco on the cusp of his annual Dreamforce convention.
Comedians Iliana Glazer and Kumail Nanjiani abruptly canceled their Thursday sets at the Moscone Center while billionaire venture capitalist Ron Conway, the preferred financier of Mayor Ed Lee and later London Breed, abruptly quit Salesforce’s philanthropic arm. In an email to Benioff, Conway lambasted the Salesforce CEO’s longstanding threat to move the convention to Las Vegas, which has a higher crime rate than San Francisco. He also accused Benioff of urging a federal intervention to save costs on Dreamforce.
“San Francisco does not need a federal invasion because you don’t like paying for extra security for Dreamforce,” Conway wrote.
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.
This year Dreamforce is one of just five events in 2025 in which the SFPD preemptively canceled officers’ pre-planned days off to ensure fuller deployments (the others were a January J.P. Morgan conference, the NBA All-Star Game, Pride Weekend and New Year’s Eve).
The San Francisco Police Department confirmed that officers working Dreamforce and paid by Salesforce through the 10(b) program are inside Moscone Center, directing traffic outside, and at the Chase Center for the Metallica and Benson Boone concert. Retired police ambassadors were also paid by Salesforce through the 10(b) program to work at hotels during the conference.
The police have not yet tabulated the cost due from this year’s Dreamforce deployment.
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.
And while Benioff has claimed that San Francisco is at its safest during Dreamforce, police sources pushed back on that.
“If you’re in SoMa for that week? Yes it is objectively safer,” says a veteran officer who has worked multiple Dreamforce conventions. “Everyone is out there nonstop. The SWAT team is out there with all their armor on, just in case.”
But if police are needed elsewhere in the city, the glut of officers in SoMa will have to “break away and respond.”
With officers working “Extended Work Week” special event overtime and deployed at or near Dreamforce, California Highway Patrol troopers are presently stationed at 16th and 24th Street BART Plazas and patrolling throughout San Francisco.
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.’”
Additional reporting by Joe Rivano Barros
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