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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?"
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.
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.
"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.
They're black, you mean. Scary black people.
You wish: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
"The 2010 United States Census[9] reported that Menlo Park had a population of 32,026." ... "The racial makeup of Menlo Park was 22,494 (70.2%) White, 1,551 (4.8%) African American, 156 (0.5%) Native American, 3,157 (9.9%) Asian, 454 (1.4%) Pacific Islander, 2,776 (8.7%) from other races, and 1,438 (4.5%) from two or more races."
You don't have to be a particular race to live in a slum, you just have to have bad neighbors who make things miserable for everyone else.
> . . . 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.
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?
if they said $200,000 for some wanker to hang around all day and pretend
to do a little php work you wouldn't have batted an eye
Take texas or South Dakota or either of the Carolinas... how much of this police buying are we seeing there? Not much.
My neighborhood in Dallas pays $70K/year for what the DPD calls "ENP" (Enhanced Neighborhood Patrol). For the $70K we get two armed, uniformed police officers driving a marked DPD patrol car for 1000 hours per year (above their regular patrols) in a neighborhood of about 1 square mile. This sort of thing goes on in neighborhoods all over town, and the DPD has a similar program for businesses that is quite popular as well. My brother who lives in Houston also has paid patrols by the HPD in his neighborhood (don't know the costs).
Anyway, "police buying" is alive and well down here in the Lone Star State. Come on down & check it out. (if you do make it down here, don't let anybody know you failed to capitalize the "T" in "Texas"...you might get shot)
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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