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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?"
"If the service isn't good, fix it for everybody"
They did.
They earmarked the funds for a cop, instead of just giving the city money to spend on whatever stupid, politically motivated bullshit worth maybe $25,000 some city councilman's brother in law could get away with selling the city for that same $200,000.
I rather approve of earmarks like this.
If I could earmark donated funds for specific uses, like solar powered LED street lights that pretty much never need service for 20+ years, I'd probably buy several for my neighborhood, as they are ~$500 each, and labor to put them up couldn't be more than ~$200 each (and if it was, I'd hire the private contractors to do the work instead of city employees). I'd happily pay $3,500 out of pocket for 5 lights to get safer streets in my immediate neighborhood.
> . . . so where do all the slum, crime and ghetto folks go when the place gets gentrified . . .
I dunno, camp out in Ravesnwood?
But seriously, what's the alternative? Leave the area a rat hole because certain kinds of people need to live in rat holes?
I spent a year at Tan House back in the day, and can say that the tales of massive prostitution and drug use were exaggerated. They did have a serious cockroach problem, though. I remember a note tacked up by the mailboxes, in the vein of "You people need to stop living like pigs!" Fun times.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Not at all. Rather, an officer has a much easier time justifying a lawful detainment than a private citizen does and is on much more solid legal ground if he or she has to use force in the furtherance of a legal goal. Officers also typically have more training and experiencing both in preventing the need for such force and using it appropriately when necessary. (There are, of course, examples to the contrary.)
If an officer truly just unlawfully detains you, then the question becomes whether or not that unlawful detainment violated a clearly established constitutional right. If so, qualified immunity generally doesn't apply and someone is getting out their checkbook. In fact, as an agent of the state, an officer is at greater peril if they violate your rights as they can be both civilly and criminally liable at both the state and federal level and they can also receive departmental discipline. What that means is that a single action can result in repercussions for the officer in five different venues.
Again, I am not a lawyer and I am skipping over a lot of important details that aren't really relevant to a hypothetical like this.
How many roads must a man walk down? 42.