San Francisco, California - President Donald Trump said Thursday he was postponing a "surge" of federal forces into San Francisco, after repeatedly musing about sending troops into a city Republicans routinely paint as a crime-ridden hellhole.

Trump said he had been readying to order action over the weekend but had been persuaded to step back after speaking to "friends of mine who live in the area" and to Mayor Daniel Lurie.

Lurie "asked, very nicely, that I give him a chance to see if he can turn it around. I told him I think he is making a mistake, because we can do it much faster, and remove the criminals that the Law does not permit him to remove," Trump wrote on his Truth Social website.

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"Therefore, we will not surge San Francisco on Saturday. Stay tuned!"

Lurie, a Democrat who this week warned that masked immigration agents were using tactics designed to create a backlash, said Thursday he had told Trump San Francisco was on the up, and had been assured the federal government was stepping back.

"The president told me clearly that he was calling off any plans for a federal deployment in San Francisco," Lurie said. "Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem reaffirmed that direction in our conversation this morning."

San Francisco serves as a shorthand in Republican circles for everything that is wrong with American cities.

The tech hub features regularly on right-wing cable news as a place of spiraling criminality and consequence-free drug use among a rampaging population of homeless people.

The reality is more nuanced: unlike a lot of American cities whose down-at-heel districts might be easily avoided, many of San Francisco's problems are concentrated in an area next to the business district and near places popular with tourists.

While this makes the behavior more visible, statistics reveal the city's crime rates are plunging.

Figures from the San Francisco Police Department and the California Department of Justice show the number of murders is at a seven-decade low, while robberies are down to levels not seen in 40 years.

Along with an aggressive campaign to arrest and deport migrants using masked agents, Trump has angered Democratic Party-controlled cities like Los Angeles and Washington by sending in National Guard troops.

His supporters claim this is necessary to stem rising crime and should spread to other cities, but opponents say it is an authoritarian move intended to inflame tensions, and the deployments have faced legal pushback as well.