
Facebook is using the Menlo Park Police Department to reshape the city - johnny313
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d3akm7/how-facebook-bought-a-police-force
======
knzhou
This article is an interesting example of using careful wording to paint one
side as maximally sympathetic and the other as maximally unsympathetic. It's
the kind of thing that should be read in high school classes to help train
critical thinking.

In the beginning, there is not much information, but an extraordinary amount
of editorialization, where neutral things get adjectives slapped onto them to
make the reader know what side they're supposed to be on. I went through and
collated them:

> dutiful compliance occupying communities mostly white deeply unusual
> isolated campus imperial fashion latest conquest snatched up alarming
> sinister in its own image manipulation tiny technotopia

In the middle, there's the classic catch-22. Facebook is causing
gentrification and "displacing families" when its employees move into poor
communities. But when its employees choose to move in elsewhere, it is an
"isolated" "tiny techtopia" that is "excluding the communities from their
wealth". As usual you are damned if you do and damned if you don't.

Later, it finally concedes that bikes actually are constantly stolen from
Facebook, which is the whole point of its actions in the first place, but goes
to great lengths to avoid calling it stealing:

> "You have an extremely poor community that is being flooded with toys of
> wealth, and these things are going to happen"

> "teens in low-income areas [...] should not be detained or ticketed for,
> say, using a Facebook bicycle to get to school"

> "[parents should not have to worry] about their kids having a bad
> interaction with the police over a stupid bike"

I live in Menlo Park (though not a tech employee) and almost had my bike
stolen last week. I would be pissed off if the police caught the thief and let
them off because it's "a stupid bike". It's how I commute, I can't function
without it, and I can't just buy another one.

In the end I can't find any reason to be upset -- I don't think there's a
difference between ~10,000 Menlo Park residents independently complaining to
the police about theft, and Facebook (who hires ~10,000 Menlo Park residents)
merely collating them. Facebook isn't getting a say in Menlo Park affairs
because it's a big corporation, it's because its employees make up a
significant share of the population. That is fair.

~~~
mindgam3
> I don't think there's a difference between ~10,000 residents independently
> complaining about theft, and Facebook (who hires ~10,000 Menlo Park
> residents) merely collating them.

With respect - if you don’t see a difference between stealing an individual
citizen’s bike and stealing one from a fleet owned by a company worth half a
trillion dollars, perhaps you should be the one working on critical thinking
skills instead of lecturing others.

~~~
jeromic
Legally, I see no difference. It's a matter of equality under the law.
Everyone, including corporations, has the same property rights as everyone
else, all theft is illegal. This is beneficial for decreasing instability and
corruption in a society.

I would guess your underlying contention is the wealth disparity, but that is
a different issue with better solutions than weakening property rights for
rich people or corporations.

And prefacing your comment with 'with respect' does not excuse accusing those
who disagree with you of having inadequate 'critical thinking skills'.

~~~
fzeroracer
Legally doesn't mean anything in this scenario. What you should be doing is
looking at how the police execute these things in practice.

Which is that typically the police don't give a single shit about stolen bikes
or anything like that unless you're rich or, apparently, Facebook. The poor
already have weaker property rights than the rich, because if they were to
report their bikes as being stolen the police would scoff at them and continue
doing jack shit. Or worse, if you're a minority.

And generally speaking, Facebook encouraging confrontations with the police
which are historically very dangerous for minorities even if they've done
absolutely nothing wrong is probably a bad idea.

~~~
knzhou
> Which is that typically the police don't give a single shit about stolen
> bikes or anything like that unless you're rich or, apparently, Facebook. The
> poor already have weaker property rights than the rich, because if they were
> to report their bikes as being stolen the police would scoff at them and
> continue doing jack shit. Or worse, if you're a minority.

This is just totally wrong. Police have scoffed at all property theft I've
ever reported to them, and it wasn't due to malice, it was because doing
anything about it was basically impossible. I suppose I could have demanded
they spend 10 hours a week scanning Craigslist for my stuff, but that is a
waste of time for them. The same applies to everybody I know who has had stuff
stolen.

Facebook's bikes are different because they very obviously belong to Facebook
and are clearly, visibly being used. It's like cattle branding, it makes it
much easier to recover property.

~~~
fzeroracer
If you very obviously branded your bike so that it was completely and
indistinguishably yours, do you think the police would bother to hunt down the
person who stole your bike?

Because from my experience and knowledge, the answer to that would be a firm
'No'.

~~~
knzhou
I'm getting very confused with all of your comments. Do you want more policing
of theft in poor communities, such as East Palo Alto, or less? I currently
live in the rich part of Menlo Park (thank god for subsidized housing). Do you
think there should be more policing of bike theft there, or less?

At some point, I thought your point was that more policing in poor communities
was bad, because disparate impact on them is the problem. But later you seem
to be saying that more policing in rich communities is the problem, because
they get better service. And now you seem to be saying that actually, there
isn't enough policing in my (rich) community. From my perspective your
position has flipped three times.

~~~
fzeroracer
My position hasn't 'flipped' at all. I'll break it down into two points.

The first is that you claimed the police would do something about these thefts
if the item was easily identifiable and visibly used. My counter argument is
that even if you had a bike that was perfectly unique and identifiable, that
the police wouldn't do anything unless you were wealthy and/or a corporation
which has increased influence on them.

The second point is that Facebook attempting to police this behavior and bend
the local police to its will has a net negative effect for the local
population, because as the article points out, the police are racially
profiling people in order to figure out if someone stole the bike or not, and
are harassing/arresting people because of it.

You're trying to break down a complex argument into something black/white as
'more policing/less', which is also exactly what your original argument did in
trying to play down the arguments the Vice article was bringing up. My point
has been that it's never that simple, and allowing corporations or the rich to
influence how the law is executed is a Bad Thing because it leads to two
different classes of citizens when it comes to law enforcement.

~~~
knzhou
Thanks for clarifying. My response has two points as well.

The first is that thinking about "Facebook" as ordering more policing is
misleading, because its influence in this case is not more than the 10,000
residents would have had individually. In any case, if there were 10,000 new
residents in a town who experienced a lot of theft, they could band together
to demand better police services, and you would expect more officers to be
hired. I don't think there's a difference here if those residents are
represented by a "community leader" or a Facebook HR employee. It's collective
action either way, and its power fundamentally comes from people living in
Menlo Park, not Facebook's valuation.

The second is that more or less policing of petty theft is _always_ going to
have a disproportionate impact on poorer communities, because people from such
communities commit most of it. This is not a moral judgment or a talking point
or anything else -- it is simply a fact, one which even the community leaders
quoted in this article are perfectly aware of, despite trying to word around
it.

This is the contradiction that I'm trying to point out here. There are many
examples in this thread of middle/upper-middle class people experiencing
property theft. The majority of the time, when you can track where the
property went, it's a poorer community. So in your preferred situation where
even individual, middle-class citizens can get the police to spend hours
hounding down their stolen bikes, it would _look_ a lot like richer people
sending their police into poorer communities to "harass" the people there,
which you also said was a bad result. To repeat, there is _no_ way for police
action against petty theft to fall equally on the rich and poor, because
richer people don't need or want to do it in the first place. That's why I
don't know what you actually want.

------
nostrademons
One other way to look at this narrative is "Facebook provides bicycles as an
employee benefit. They are to be used only by employees. When someone took
them off campus, Facebook assumed theft and notified the local police. When
they discovered that the person was in fact a Facebook employee and entitled
to the use of the bicycle, they dropped the charges."

You can still argue about the legitimacy of private corporate-owned property
as an employee benefit at all, along with the potential racial profiling that
led people to assume that a Hispanic man was not a Facebook employee. But I'm
not sure that their actions would've been all that different if it had been a
white brogrammer that took the bike home - they'd probably call the police,
the police would investigate, and if it was found to be an employee, the
charges would be dropped.

~~~
cowpig
As a white dude who has had many experiences with cops, I can tell you that if
a police officer asked me if I stole Facebook bike I was riding, and I
replied, "no, I'm an employee," they _might_ ask for some kind of evidence
before letting me move on with my life.

I've seen how different my friends of color are treated by cops everywhere in
the US, and pretending that's not a thing is either ignorant or disingenuous.

~~~
ahbyb
I'm not sure what colour your "friends of colour" are, but if we assume black,
I'm sure a properly dressed black person (which is what I'd expect from a
Facebook employee) won't receive as much scrutiny as one that wears baggy
pants.

~~~
ccvannorman
Let me try to rephrase your point: A well-dressed black man will get less
scrutiny than a poorly-dressed black man,

but you don't address at all that they're still both more scrutinized than
their white counterparts?

What is your point?

------
angf
Facebook should be called to account if they broke any laws and were not
prosecuted for it. I don't see any evidence of that in the article. What I do
see is an article heavy on racial overtones, as if trying to manufacture
outrage at Facebook.

What should a large company do in this case? Who should pay for the extra
civic services that a company's presence causes? Residents?

~~~
knzhou
> What should a large company do in this case?

If you pay, it's "sinister". If you don't pay, it's "parasitic". If you get
your own, it's "mercenary". In all cases it is "dystopian".

------
deogeo
> Menlo Park, an affluent, mostly white city of 35,000

To repeat from the previous time this was posted: According to their own
source, Menlo Park is 70% white, but this includes Hispanics, who make up 18%.
Assuming they were mostly counted under white, this leaves whites as barely
over half of the residents - certainly less than the 61% non-Hispanic white of
the US as a whole [1]. So why does Vice try to frame Menlo Park as some sort
of white stronghold, when it's less white than the US on average?

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_State...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_States#Race_and_ethnicity)

~~~
mertd
What the stats don't tell you is that the city is divided by a 8 lane freeway
where the affluent folks live on one side and FB campus is on the other side.

------
saagarjha
> The dutiful compliance of the police—first chasing after Facebook property
> that Facebook employees left around the community as litter, then standing
> down when told by Facebook that the culprit was part of a special, protected
> class—is a minor instantiation of a broader issue: Just how intertwined
> Facebook and local police have become.

I don’t get this characterization at all. Facebook thought that some of its
bikes were missing, thought they were stolen, contacted the police, and told
the police to do nothing when they figured out the bike was being used by a
Facebook employee. How is this problematic or even not normal?

~~~
riversflow
Have you ever been a victim of property theft? The police caring is highly
irregular. Feels like justice for the rich.

~~~
knzhou
I've had stuff stolen from me plenty of times, and the police never cared
because there was nothing they could do about it. My stuff was here, now it
isn't, what are they supposed to do?

Obviously it's different if the owner of a stolen thing literally sees it out
on the street, which is what happened in this case.

~~~
FireBeyond
I've had phones stolen and found them on eBay. I have had the buyer of said
phone give me the identity info of the seller (when they refused a refund).
I've gone to the local, quiet, PD with this information, along with the
seller's eBay shop which had over 100 laptops and phones, almost all listed as
"activation locked", "unknown PIN", "no charger/no case/no accessories".

"Well, he probably didn't know that they were stolen". "Other than the message
on the screen of mine at least that says "Stolen phone, please call, reward
offered...?"

They couldn't care less.

~~~
t34543
Law enforcement is highly subjective and irregular. This is the true danger of
things like facial recognition, ANPR, etc.

------
askar_yu
Constant emphasis on 'people of color' makes it hard to read and dilutes the
main point. Such obsession to view everything through the length of race is
mind boggling. This is seems to be a US thing.

I mean, you steal a bike, you are responsible. Whether you're mostly brown,
mostly white or mostly blue is irrelevant. As simple as that.

------
LurkersWillLurk
Calling the "Facebook police unit" \- a group of city police officers assigned
to the Facebook campus - the "privatization of the law" is quite overblown,
especially when compared to the actual private police departments that exist
across the United States.

If the residents of Menlo Park don't like how their police department
operates, then they can elect new city leadership to change the police
department accordingly.

Compare that to university police, which is often controlled by the university
trustees. Who elects the trustees? It usually isn't the undergraduates, which
comprise the majority of the university's population. Whether it's the state
governor, legislature, or alumni, the decisionmakers charged with
administering the police power do not answer to those against whom that power
is used.

It gets worse with railroad police, which are wholly owned, funded, and
operated by private railroad companies, and have national jurisdiction.

The powers of the state should never be in the hands of a private corporation,
organization, or university, but what's happening at Facebook isn't that at
all.

------
situational87
>The dutiful compliance of the police—first chasing after Facebook property
that Facebook employees left around the community as litter, then standing
down when told by Facebook that the culprit was part of a special, protected
class

Wow, I didn't realize we were already living in a corporate anime dystopia. I
mean I knew it was on the way, but holy cow I guess it already happened.

------
CodeWriter23
What’s really astonishing to me is Facebook can’t develop a mobile app to
secure the bikes to prevent unauthorized riding and to hold their employees
accountable for littering the city with discarded bikes.

------
rolph
This is something that could be mutual opportunity, instead it has become a
conflict.

What does a bicycle cost F13? What is preventing F13 from providing bikes and
shopping carts to the community , as a service?

Why would F13 want to pass up the opportunity for data?

~~~
smelendez
What is F13?

~~~
rolph
its an acronym for F@(3 13oo|<

------
mnm1
If you're rich enough you not only get to ignore laws you don't like, you get
your own police force to do your dirty work. Whether that's kicking out
Latinos in Menlo Park today or rounding up slaves back in the days America was
"great," it's a long-standing tradition with roots going back hundreds of
years in America.

