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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?"
200k plus for *ONE* cop? I know that health insurence and retirement bennies add to the base wage, but 200k plus a year? How much is this dude making take home?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
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.
I work down the street from their menlo park/willow road campus. Right now Facebook is building an apartment complex across the street from HQ. They've promised to only rent 10% of the apartments to their employees with the other 90% being offered to the general public at market rate.
Despite the nice sounding name, Menlo Park's east side is akin to East Palo Alto. Slum neighborhoods, crime, ghetto. With the influx of google/facebook employees however the neighborhood is slowly gentrifying.
I think facebook wants to turn the neighborhood into something more appealing for their employees.
Everything. And at some level, society needs to be built around facilitating and accommodating business. Again... they pay for EVERYTHING.
Should any one business get preferential treatment? No.
However, business itself should get preferential treatment.
Why? Because if business is unhappy in a given area... the area dies. Look at Detroit. That's what happens if you piss all over business for decades. And keep in mind, Detroit has had tens of billions pumped into it by the federal government to try and keep it alive. Over many years going back generations now. It doesn't matter. Piss on business and you'll wither and die.
So... getting to the issue of these private police and bus passes. Why are these companies giving the local government extra money? Because the local government is shaking them down. Google for example is having its ability to commute workers into and out of San Fransisco interfered with... that's not sustainable. Either it has to stop or Google can't maintain a workforce in the city. Google has therefore attempted to bribe the city into doing something the city should have done at no additional cost.
As to facebook... no idea why they're buying the police. But I can only assume they've had security problems and the local police were not responsive. As a result... they've felt the need to incentive assistance.
All told the whole thing is pretty sad. And before someone talks about the evil corporations, lets get something straight... look around the country in more business friendly areas. Take texas or South Dakota or either of the Carolinas... how much of this police buying are we seeing there? Not much. So California is where we're seeing this now.
Why of why would that be?
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Yeah, but it's about moving the Overton window. As the democratic state becomes weaker, private businesses take over a governing role. Before you had to bribe - now you just pay directly for cops.
When they are fully funded by taxes alone. Please, it is virtually impossible to get rid of any police officer for anything. Look at the CA Dorner case. Police shot at two cars of innocent people and nothing happened to them - at all. And people worry about this. Bullshit.
Valid point, but there are key legal and practical differences. I am not a lawyer and I may not be read up on all the recent cases, but I am a police officer and I have looked into this area a bit a while back.
For example, police officers acting in their official capacity (regardless of who pays) are generally entitled to qualified immunity. While private guards may qualify for qualified immunity in some circumstances, the law there is much less clear and their use in actual roles requiring action (rather than just observing and reporting) can be a major source of liability.
That is, Facebook would generally be liable for actions taken by private security working directly for them. They set the policy the security guard follows and are liable for the consequences of that policy. Police officers, on the other hand, work for the city (or county or state or federal) and their actions are generally governed by policy and law, which may act as a buffer between Facebook's deep pockets and potential lawsuits.
Additionally, even in states where a citizen's arrest is perfectly legal, there are logistical concerns. In the states I am familiar with, resisting an officer who is effecting a legal arrest is illegal and in some states even resisting an illegal arrest is illegal unless certain other elements (i.e. risk of physical harm) are involved. When a citizen is attempting to effect the arrest, it is much easier for the person being arrested to simply claim they were being assaulted and fought back and there is no simple way to determine who is right.
Having a trained, experienced, uniformed police officer effecting the arrest undercuts this argument because it isn't (generally) reasonable for an individual to claim they were being randomly assaulted by an on-duty officer.
How many roads must a man walk down? 42.
Private entities pay for cops all the time, this isn't as radical as it seems. For instance, when I used to be involved in student government we knew that part of the cost of having a big event was having to pay for the mandatory number of cops who had to be there. The city knew that college students in large groups were trouble, and they didn't want to have to foot the bill, so they passed an ordance that required us to foot the bill for any event with X number of people expected (I forget what X was).
I'm pretty sure the same thing happens with some concerts, sporting events, etc.: the municipalities don't want to pay, so they make the entity responsible pay for it. Then again, lots of stadium owners have cozy deals with the city, which probably avoid this sort of thing.
In any case, the only unusual thing about this that I can see is that's a full-time gig.
Those are valid points but there are body cameras for emergency and law enforcement workers that can document a security guards interaction with suspicious people if a security guard's employer needs legal indemnification.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
There is a reason it is now called ANCIENT Rome...
"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.
Isn't that what taxes are ? Paying for the "protection" of violence which might comes upon us if we don't "pay".
Perhaps large corporations contributing to public funds goes some tiny way to compensate for their tax avoidance schemes, that helped make the local and federal governments short of cash in the first place.
Unless you don't pay taxes, you already are.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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.
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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.
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?
Ah, yes, the old "fair share" argument. Tell you what: feel free not to take the deductions and exemptions you are entitled to take on your taxes. What? You don't feel like volunteering to pay more than you owe? Wow, neither does Facebook!
If you think FB isn't paying enough taxes then push for a simplified tax code without deductions. You people act like individuals/companies are doing something wrong by not volunteering to pay more taxes than they are required to do. If you think they are actually defrauding the government rather than abiding by the laws, then by all means, attempt to have them audited and prosecuted.
Don't blame people for being smart, though. FFS, it's just *ironic* to do that on a "nerd" site.
BTW, I see you are a member of the "let's have no police officer in the area at all" camp. Remember, there's no third option where you magically extract more money from the public and inject it into the government's budget. This city needs FB far more than FB needs the city. Enjoy your ivory tower. Hope you don't get mugged without any police protection there.
The problem is that when that happens, then the city cuts police funding by $200k. Earmarks don't work, unless the person giving them has some say over their use (as an annual grant has). But like the Lotto in Texas going to schools resulted in the school funding from the general fund decreasing by the amount earned in the lotto, the result was exactly the same as if the lotto funded the general fund, but was an easier sell to lie about it's use.
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The problem is that by paying for the cop, they tell the city "there'd better be a cop right here".
I expect the conversation went more like this:
FB: "We are building new housing in a ghetto area and we plan to have 10% of it go to our employees, and 90% of it to be rented at below market rates do that people can have better housing; all of this will be worthless, however, if no one wants to live there due to the high crime rate in the area. We'd like to see periodic patrols by a police officer in the area"
MP: "Sorry, we don't have enough officers to guarantee periodic patrols in the area that you're requesting"
FB: "Have another officer, on us, then, so that you can periodically patrol the area"
MP: "Thanks!"
Mega corporations do whatever they can to dodge taxes, and then discover that they need tax-funded public services: cops and transports. What is next? Microsoft will subsidize roads? Cisco will build a sewage? Apple will raise an army?
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.
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To be fair, that culture comes from both sides. When your neighbor is blasting their music at 2 in the morning or have an idiot dog barking all evening and you try and get the city laws enforced, half of the time you're told to deal with it, mind your own business, and if you don't like it, get the fuck out.
It doesn't take too many times of crap like that happening before anyone with a bit more money than average takes the hint and does just that. Which means after a while, all the rich people just isolate themselves from the rest. And since there's only so many places where they can "get the fuck out", you end up with gentrification.
So really, everyone's responsible.
There is already precedence for this and it is somewhat simple to follow. Almost every college campus has it's own cops that are stationed on campus for the sole benefit of the campus and the college pays for the costs (some campuses have their own police force with the same powers as regular cops by law). Most medical centers of decent size and emergency room/hospitals have the same. The local hospital here has 5 officers working it (covering 3 shifts) and it is actually 4 or 5 blocks from the main police department.
What happens is that they patrol primarily the area they are in charge of- be it a college campus of hospital or whatever. They go on assists when needed (even off campus), will follow a fleeing suspect off campus if necessary, and so on. If a call comes in to 9/11, unless it is an assist (meaning something that requires a large police presence or everyone else is occupied), they won't go unless the call came from their area.
Think of it like a substation or precinct but on a smaller scale. The cop is a cop city wide, but they have their territory they stay in unless needed elsewhere for some reason.
The $100/hour seems about right for what utilities and others pay for a cop on private detail. The officer gets some of that in overtime, the city gets the rest as "profit" and overhead. $200k/year for a trained, licensed cop seems in the ballpark once you take into effect training, equipment, benefits, hiring and other costs. Your $75K/year PHP programmer probably costs the company $150K/year once you add in benefits, recruiting, real estate and training.