Facebook is using the Menlo Park Police Department to reshape the city
vice.com
vice.com
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.
Why can’t Facebook keep track of its own bikes? Cops don’t scale like gps does.
> Why can’t Facebook keep track of its own bikes? Cops don’t scale like gps does.
Things don't magically become easier because you're part of a corporation. Try replacing the word "Facebook" with "10,000 Menlo Park residents", does it still sound obvious how to prevent bike theft? I sure hope when my bike does eventually get stolen, you won't tell me the same thing.
End of the day, people are stealing bikes.
No mention of the reason they are stealing bread because reminding the population of the exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoise is forbidden!
But sure, focus on the fact that a contractor took two bikes home, and not on the disproportionate response.
One of the reasons that regressive policing, etc happen is that "the proletariat" in the community are also sick of having their shit stolen. The (legit) complaints come later.
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.
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'.
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.
This is the thing I can never understand in these debates: I never have the slightest clue whether the people I'm talking with want more policing or less. It seems to switch every few minutes.
It's substantially easier for the police to find Facebook's bikes than a regular, unmarked bike; conversely, it's exceedingly difficult to recover a bike that has no tracking or special identifying features.
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.
Because from my experience and knowledge, the answer to that would be a firm 'No'.
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.
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.
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.
I mean, I can play this game too. When I have my bike stolen, I report it to the police and just have to buy another one. But when a few overworked HR people have their 10th bike stolen of the week, they report it to the police and in turn get smeared in hit pieces without any opportunity to defend themselves, by an media industry worth $1 trillion. Why is the little guy getting crushed by these corporate behemoths?
The point is, if you play with narrative like this, the little guy can be whoever you want it to be. That's why narratives are fundamentally dishonest.
This is so common in the news media now. It's like the author has to be so sure that you're feeling the exact emotions that they want you to feel about something that the writing comes off as clumsy and spoonfeedy.
NYT is one of the absolute worst offenders, I didn't think Vice was that bad. I guess not
I would be pissed off if the police caught the thief and let him go
All they do is have you enter a report on their web site and print it for your insurer, if any.
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.
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.
but you don't address at all that they're still both more scrutinized than their white counterparts?
What is your point?
Color may indeed be a factor in some situations, however I have found that, to be an issue, that is heavily dependent on location, time of day, and when combined with other factors such as clothing, tattoos, and many other signals.
You or I might or not get asked for proof of fbook employment with color being a factor in that, sure - however I do believe that other factors would weigh on that choice even more. Compare two made up people - one with a pocket protector, a patagonia vest, some khakis, dress shoes.. another has sagging jeans, tattoos, a snoop dogg tshirt (or willie nelson for that matter), whatever... with attributes like those, I would bet that the other factors would have more to do with the choice to verify than just color.
This is not to say that there are not bad cops in the world who only go by things that they should not - and I certainly strongly believe we need more different training, and checkups with our law enforcers in this country (and the world) 100% -
I can say that many other factors are at play when most cops try to summarize things - time of day and location, along with other signifiers are something that usually play more of a role in decisions.
These things are not always good indicators of good guy / bad guy - its just something that plays out to be helpful in more situations than not.
I also do not agree with the 'everywhere in the US' statement - things are very different in my neck of the woods when you drive only 30 minutes - and they change immensely when you drive another 30. One could experience all kinds of different treatment based on things like color, type of car, type of clothing, choice in music, ways of speaking, all sorts of things, and that treatment could change every 30 minutes all day long, and you wouldn't even cover but a small percentage of this country.
I mean, duh. The argument is that color is a large percentage of the end result, and that doesn't change just "because there are many other contributing factors you didn't mention".
2 - I did not think it was an argument - just putting some considerations out there. I don't know you and your experiences, it appears to that me pointing out some things was more intended for other audiences though. Would be great if everyone knew 'duh... ...there are many other contributing factors' -
sadly though, I find more and more people influenced by their LED screens to determine the reality of America out there. Whether it's people from other countries reading this thread or other 'news' - or school kids that have not traveled this large diverse country - even people I have engaged with living in the cities - there are things spouted out, and believed, that are not a 'large percentage' - yet it's touted as being true.
I believe you, I, and others in much of the USA are more likely to be viewed with suspicion, followed, harassed or whatever based upon socio-economic 'signals' - than color, or even voice accent.
Yes, there are 'many other contributing factors you didn't mention' - I am glad you realize that, I am hoping that other people who read similar things are also presented this information - those who already know seem to understand it - yet they often fail to mention it when sharing with others that may not know the full scope of how things really are.
It may not change the end result for you and me, but it certainly can change other people's perception who don't have the same understanding as you seem to have, which could be many other people being influenced / affected by such public statements.
What should a large company do in this case? Who should pay for the extra civic services that a company's presence causes? Residents?
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".
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...
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?
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.
How much free time do you think these guys have? They have a full time job, you know.
My dad likes to tell this story: when he was my age, his bike would get stolen all the time, and it would always end up at the same spot in the local flea market. He'd come up and say "that's my bike!", they'd say "no it isn't", and he'd just have to buy it back.
Now suppose the police actually could have been damned to show up. Obviously, the same thing would happen. He'd say "that's my bike!", they'd say "no it isn't", they would just stare at each other for a while and the policeman would have wasted his time.
For this reason property crime has never been worth it for police to pursue unless the object is very valuable, or unique, or its ownership is easily identifiable. Yes, that correlates with being rich and powerful, but that's not the actual reason.
Also, the police absolutely have no business caring if something is valuable, their work all pays the same. What you are suggesting is not justice at all, and justice is at the very core of American values.
In your dad’s story, suppose he had a receipt with a serial number, which is fairly common these days. The police absolutely should have done something. The fact that you see activation locked phones on eBay is honestly disgusting, stealing a smartphone should be treated as a special case of grand theft like stolen cars! A $300 asset loss is a big hit for a lot of people, and the impact it has on the victim’s life beyond the monetary loss is substantial and usually lasting(loss of photos, contacts, communication, banking)
Try getting your phone stolen when you just started a vacation or lost a job(or both at the same time like me).
In this scenario then, only the corporations can enforce the law or prompt the police to act. Do you not see why that might be a problem?
For example, they have reduced the murder rate in East Palo Alto (right next to Facebook campus) by over 97%. That is far more important than anything discussed in this thread.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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?