Facebook To Pay City $200K-a-Year For a Neighborhood Cop

theodp writes "Valleywag reports that Facebook just bought itself a police officer and questions what kind of mechanism will be in place to make sure the officer — whose position Facebook has agreed to fund to the tune of $200K-a-year for 3 years — doesn't provide preferential protection for the social network giant and its employees. It's probably a fair question, considering that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder made the City of New Orleans enter into a federal consent decree designed to address the 'divided loyalties' of the city's moonlighting police officers. But for now, everything's hunky-dory in Menlo Park, where Police Chief Robert Jonsen called the deal a 'benchmark in private-public partnerships.' No doubt it is, as was last week's Google-City of San Francisco deal to fund free bus passes for low- and middle-income kids. But is giving earmarked funding to facilitate self-serving city expenditures a good or bad development?"

Comments

Bad development

[Anonymous Coward]

Pay your fucking taxes and accept good service in return. If the service isn't good, fix it for everybody or buy your own private cops. The need for private cops embarrasses the public cops, which it should.

Buying government cops is the merger of corporation and state--the very definition of fascism and inherently corrupt.

Not just cops. The Google "public private partnership" is corrupt too; but not quite as bad since it doesn't involve guys with guns.

Beats the heck out of paying taxes

[rsilvergun]

Jokes aside this stuff scares me. It's basically the rich getting their social services without letting the poors have them. Very few people recognize the tremendous amount of luck that goes into becoming and then staying wealthy. It basically means either a) life was handed to you on a silver plate or b) absolutely nothing major ever went wrong in your life or the lives of your immediate family.

It's like how the fund the schools here with property tax. They don't do that to be fair. They do it so the rich don't have to pay for the poor's educations.

Now, on the topic of why the rich _should_ be paying for that. Well, that's the price of a stable and progressive civilization.

Pretty Simple

[The Cat]

This is just a quiet, PR-positive way of very slowly taking governance out of the hands of voters and putting it in the hands of corporate executives. You can read about it here.

Armed soldiers with arrest powers no longer accountable to the people? What could go wrong?

Detroit lost nearly every viable job...

[rsilvergun]

when all the manufacturing moved to Mexico & China. It happened almost overnight, but they still had millions of people and a large infrastructure. Naturally the tax base collapse and the schools became hopelessly underfunded while their students struggled with a level of poverty normally reserved for blasted out sections of Afghanistan.

I know it's fashionable to blame Detroit's problems on the Evil Tax And Spend Democrats (tm), but even a cursory glance at the facts proves it otherwise.