Facebook offers to pay Menlo Park $600k to hire a cop

http://www.mercurynews.com/peninsula/ci_25252305/facebook-offers-pay-menlo-park-600-000-hire

by bdehaaff • 12 years ago

74 72 12 years ago

Shenglong• 12 years ago

Interesting. Increased security, faster response times, and public image at such a cheap rate is probably a no-brainer for large tech companies like Facebook.

I feel like we're going to see more private funding for public positions in the (perhaps distant) future, but I suppose the obvious question is: at what point does private funding of public officials become theoretically troublesome? Some would call this the start to an unsettling change.

bane• 12 years ago

There's a movie about this exact subject called Robocop.

Argorak• 12 years ago

Privatized police forces are also one of the standard topics of cyberpunk.

enraged_camel• 12 years ago

Why do you think Google is investing so much into robotics? ;)

legacy2013• 12 years ago

If they want to make a donation to the city with a stipulation that it goes towards a new officer being hired that's fine. It becomes unsettling if they begin being able to dictate what that public official is supposed to do

GuiA• 12 years ago

It's a very fuzzy line though. One moment they can be making regular donations to the city, and at another moment they can say "oh you know those donations we've been making, we'd probably have to stop because we can't afford them anymore... Unless of course law X gets passed, wink wink"

jonnathanson• 12 years ago

Some lines are being blurred here, and perhaps it's troubling in the abstract, but it's too early to tell. For now, it seems more like a donation and less like a buyout.

If we want to call attention to something very troubling in the here and now, we should look at the for-profit prison industry. That's a whole different ball of wax.

a3n• 12 years ago

We name stadiums after corporations (by selling the naming rights).

I'm sure we'll soon be naming mayorships, as occupants of governments from the smallest city to the federal government continue to be elected by cutting budgets and then cry because there's no money to provide basic services.

They'll be called smart public-private partnerships.

yeukhon3• 12 years ago

Facebook has committed to provide up to $600,000 over three years, enough in the city's estimate to cover the salary and benefits of a full-time officer.

According to this http://jeffwongdesign.com/2010/03/nypd-officers-can-make-6-f..., NYPD can make 91K after 6 years in the service.

Is Facebook paying less? I don't know the cost of benefit and insurance. I really doubt a single police officer will receive more than $100K benefit in three years. I would be very surprise if they do!

I am not against Facebook pays the city to hire additional security personnel. I am all for companies and community putting a fund together to hire additional police officers or firefighters or EMT, but this worries me:

"Let's say Facebook has a need of assistance, or some other large company, and says, 'We want to have drills for an active shooter or a bomb threat. We need you to help us put that together.' They'd have an actual person (to assist)," Bertini said.

I am not saying we don't want to have more police officers, but right now, rich companies can directly fund government outside of taxation.

They are directly paying to hire government employee. Why can't Facebook have their own outreach team to work with local police public relation to carry out such plan (to reduce student truancy). Also, consider security guards are paid at a lower rate, why can't we help boost their salary (see http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2541541/Google-hirin...)?

In the case of bomb threat or shooting, I am damn sure a 911 call is enough to get 100 county officers from MP and nearby county. A single officer will not help much.

It seems like they are just concerned with unauthorized access rather than defeating crime rate.

trhway• 12 years ago

Also, consider security guards are paid at a lower rate, why can't we help boost their salary

sworn officer vs. security guard is like a queen vs. pawn.

It seems like they are just concerned with unauthorized access rather than defeating crime rate.

something like 10 years ago (when i was commuting to that Sun's (back then) campus) there were police presence at that station. Not that it was affecting much, at least at the outsider look it is the same now as it has been through all these years. Given the generational shift - FB employees are supposedly like to walk and ride bikes and live nearby with the campus - the police presence seems like another perk FB is trying to buy for their employees as this place - East Palo Alto - is supposedly looking scary to young people coming from good families in good neighborhoods :)

yeukhon3• 12 years ago

Well I don't argue that security guards are obviously 10x less trained than a cop. But you have to agree that if they want to provide security to employees, they need to hire a GOOD security guard agency. I have never been to FB and I don't know how well trained the security guards at FB are, but these people are really your first responder when a threat occurs on campus, immediately. They are the one going to do the gatekeeping for FB. If they could hire a better security agency, they should. Right now I feel like FB is trying to be cost-effective; instead of spending $1-3M for better security guards, they are just throwing $1M out there to get 3-4 cops.

glenra• 12 years ago

In addition to the cost of benefits - which can be HUGE for jobs of that sort (if you take proper account of the value of early retirement with a defined benefit pension) - there's also the overhead associated with hiring that cop. Getting that cop a suitable car, phone, gun, desk space in an office and so on.

maaku• 12 years ago

NYPD can make 91K after 6 years in the service. Is Facebook paying less? I don't know the cost of benefit and insurance. I really doubt a single police officer will receive more than $100K benefit in three years. I would be very surprise if they do!

Rule of thumb in government: double the wage to achieve full-cost of a salaried employee.

mmorris• 12 years ago

I've always heard this rule of thumb used for employees in general, not just for government workers.

For example: http://blog.intuit.com/employees/how-much-does-an-employee-r...

kiiski• 12 years ago

In the case of bomb threat or shooting, I am damn sure a 911 call is enough to get 100 county officers from MP and nearby county. A single officer will not help much.

A single officer in the right place is far more usefull than 100 in a nearby county. Breivik was just one man. He could have been easily stopped by a single officer.

yeukhon3• 12 years ago

My point is that a single cop can't defend everyone in that area; also, security guards are really the first responder on site to be honest. IMO, FB is trying to be cost-effective; instead of spending more money on good security guards (I don't know how good they are at FB right now), FB is throwing $1M total to get a few police officers.

ars• 12 years ago

This sets a bad precedent IMO. Are the only people going to get security those that will pay [extra] for it?

It just feels wrong to be able to pay government for this kind of thing - kinda like paying the military to do something for you under the color of law.

mongol• 12 years ago

Agree. Tax money should fund the police and democratic means determine what to use them for.

zaroth2• 12 years ago

I find the negative responses quite interesting. From watching The Wire, I assume there typical way of getting this done would be simply Facebook contributing to members of the City Council.

Of the two, I might like the open proposal for direct funding of the position more than an envelop of cash passed under the table at Alexander's.

While Facebook is free to donate funds for this to the city, or not, I doubt that accepting the contribution creates any kind of enforceable contract, rather a mutual expectation which if the city renegs they simply won't be seeing any more deals like this in the future. I think from the city's perspective it's free money for a cop who is going to be at the new substation anyway.

zaroth2• 12 years ago

This was in one of the comments;

Get the gang activity under control, and it actually would be quite nice. The irony is, if it became safe, it probably would gentrify rapidly, housing prices would go up, and the poor people who rent would have to find somewhere else to live.

Is it just me who thinks it's terribly sad there are people apologizing for decreasing crime and therefore increasing property value?

The real answer is that housing should NOT be so scarce that the only thing hat makes the price affordable is weekly gang shootings. Supply should be fostered until housing can be both 'safe & affordable' using the myriad tools cities have to foster new construction.

An increase to property value is a great service to every property owner (53% owner occupied) in the city, but it's an attack on renters (41%). Another way to put it, cities should be doing great things like this to increase property value, while simultaneously fostering new construction, as a balanced approach to serve their constituency.

harlanlewis• 12 years ago

I absolutely agree with the sentiment, but density housing on high value property tends to result in high rise luxury units rather than affordable apartments.

There are worse things, but it doesn't really address the problem.

cynicalkane• 12 years ago

Yes it does. Housing is a broad market. Scarcity of housing is why a home in a faraway, dangerous neighborhood in the Bay Area could still cost $600k.

cbr• 12 years ago

When you can only build a small number of apartments you make the most money building luxury ones. But:

(1) If we allow more building we end up with as many luxury apartments as there's demand for and developers switch to building more affordable ones.

(2) When a rich person moves from wherever they're living now into a luxury apartment that opens up their previous apartment somewhere else.

cookingrobot• 12 years ago

Here's an alternate proposal: don't let companies donate to government, but do raise their taxes and provide adequate policing.

pdkl955• 12 years ago

If Facebook wants to spend money for the city that badly, they could always volunteer to pay that $600k in extra state and local taxes.

jessriedel• 12 years ago

Voluntary cash tranfers between corporations and local municipalities have existed since time immemorial. Look at almost any town with a college.

Local government are prohibited from taking as much money as they want from local companies by statute, e.g. they can only use property taxes by fair market value.

Think of how bad greater discretion would be. Local governments are quirky and idiosyncratic, and are elected by a tiny number of citizens. They are strongly constarined in their powers by the state for a reason.

jcc80• 12 years ago

"The sworn officer would focus on helping local schools increase their safety and prevent student truancy and on working with the area's large businesses to improve their security"

This really means harassing and arresting problem students and undesirables who are loitering near businesses. I say that because if you want to address the underlying issues and really "solve" the problem, you wouldn't do it with police. It sounds like they want their own private security but one that has police powers.

What comes to mind is cities that try and fix issues related to the homeless with police because it's a complex human problem that some people & businesses try to solve with punishment/enforcement. At the least, I'll venture to say there's more effective ways to combat truancy than unleashing police on them.

lutusp5• 12 years ago

This really means harassing and arresting problem students and undesirables who are loitering near businesses.

It's also probably unconstitutional, on the ground that it produces at least the appearance of selective enforcement. This kind of goal is usually achieved by hiring a private security guard, rather than paying a (normally) taxpayer-funded police department to focus its attention on a specific zone.

jmccree5• 12 years ago

I'm not really not sure about the unconstitutional argument, but it's extremely common. Normally it's done more explicitly by hiring off duty officers. NYPD has the paid detail unit to organize private details for businesses. Where I live in Atlanta, every neighborhood you'd want to live in has their own privately paid force of off-duty officers patrolling. I'm more surprised that facebook is basically offering a grant/donation than outright hiring their own off-duty officers.

otterley• 12 years ago

I'm not familiar with any case law on the issue of the constitutionality of selective enforcement. Are you?

vellum• 12 years ago

This really means harassing and arresting problem students and undesirables who are loitering near businesses.

It's also safer if they let the cops do the skull-cracking. This way Zuck doesn't have to give an awkward press conference about why his security guards were filmed beating up some teenagers in the parking lot.

verelo• 12 years ago

Private police forces, or bribes. You be the judge...

neilk• 12 years ago

A friend of mine owns a house a few blocks from Facebook. She has had to stay in her house due to shootings and police manhunts several times over the past few years.

The problem is real and I don't blame Facebook for being concerned. Although, it's sadly typical of them to propose their own privately-paid-for police force.

bertil2• 12 years ago

I’m not sure what are the other (short-term) options: Facebook encourages employees to participate in education efforts (STEMs, mostly, for obvious recruiting reasons) and Zuckerberg himself spends a lot there too — but that takes time. De-criminalising drug trade is far more controversial than what Facebook can do. I'm sure they offer well paid jobs to local people as non-technical subsidiaries but… Short of sponsoring a cash-for-gun program, what can they do? That’s a serious question: I’m sure any idea will be explored by Facebook decision-makers who read this.

e12e7• 12 years ago

Paying taxes would be a start?

pdkl955• 12 years ago

Add this data point to Facebook setting up their own dorm/apartment project[1] and their efforts prevent employees from having any free time outside of work[2] so they can undo the last century or so of social progress that gave us stuff like "(classic) feminism" and "unions"[3].

Facebook is trying to set up their own Company Town. Usually, the response to this interpretation is to dismiss the possibility, with the company town being one of those "problems from last century we don't see anymore", and dismissing the problem like that is dangerous.

The coal companies (and similar) never really lost their towns, regardless of specifics of who's name is on the land deeds. It works out the same when there's only the one employer in the area. Facebook is not alone as a newcomer, either; Google has had some questionable press recently with their buses that seen to go wherever they want like they own the place, and they've been playing land games as well. There was even a story here recently about their price-fixing scam to slow wage growth and prevent competition ("bidding wars").

While current issues like the NSA has us distracted at the moment, I strongly believe this problem - where we forget about the labor issues of the past and allow the industrial-revolution-era problems and abuses slowly creep back in - is the longer-term fight, with stuff like the NSA's spying being more of a symptom of the problem.

Many people have observed that some of the NSA's statements and "interpretations" no longer seem to be tethered to any rational "legal basis" or "social contract", as they spin yet another justification for their behavior. Similarly, if Facebook and Google, etc, are allowed to continue buying up bits and pieces of our country, I hope you like that kind of "making up the law as we go" way of doing things. Once they gain that kind of de facto control over a piece of the country, they become effectively sovereign. Any power that might stop them is too far away and dealing with their own mess.

What do you call a form of government with a weak, basically non-existent amount of central control, thereby letting a handful of very powerful, very rich players to rule over their little corner of the world as they see fit?

You call it Feudalism, of course.

[1] http://mashable.com/2013/10/03/facebook-housing-complex/

[2] http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/feminisms-tip...

[3] http://thebaffler.com/past/facebook_feminism_like_it_or_not

skore2• 12 years ago

Having read Snow Crash... I'm getting used to appreciate Neal Stephensons rather heavy handed (if only at first glance) use of Sci-Fi tropes as very dry pragmatism.

Yes, this is feudalism, plain and simple. They're simply abusing basic democratic institutions to obfuscate the fact.

satori99• 12 years ago

“This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them.”

― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

pdkl955• 12 years ago

It's worth observing that Feudalism is not the worst way of running a society. It can be relatively hands-off at times, and is certainly far better than the various forms of totalitarianism.

Still not worth losing our Constitutional Republic over.

pnathan• 12 years ago

I've lived near several Company Towns before. In the modern incarnation, it's not terrible. The execs could run the town, but they don't bother - they just seem to put in the right word in the right ear when things could be troublesome for them. Otherwise they don't seem to directly run the place. I am sure that any protest vs. the Company might turn out to be prosecuted surprisingly fast and aggressively.

On the flip side, there's a decent amount of wealth being funneled into the town via paychecks to the workers. So the total area living standard goes up, sometimes considerably. People have opportunities they didn't have before, both work-wise and otherwise, and new things can show up based upon the company's spark. Sort of like the famous Schockley Seven.

I would not qualify the towns I lived near as feudalistic. That's far too overt and encompassing. Rather, the executives/CEOs were people whose opinion might be asked on tricky policy questions, or whose opinion, when offered, was taken seriously.

pdkl955• 12 years ago

We're not there yet. For some time we regulated things, and some of the nastier abuses of the past were attenuated a bit. The particularly bad abuses were prevented entirely, and some of the wealth was distributed in a more equitable way.

The modern version that we've seen for a while still has some of the nasty effects, such as making the town (intentionally or not) a very difficult situation to leave. Forcing decisions that are bad for and rejected by a community such "lets go fracking really close to where the drinking water comes form!" seems to be popular in modern times (and a lot of local variation).

The problem, as I mentioned towards the end of the other post, is when business and government are no longer working against each other. We extract value, as citizens from the resulting equilibrium, because the nastier tendencies of either group are restrained. I'm suggesting that the NEW change, is a dramatic and sudden shift away from that regulation. You see this in Facebook and other big players such as the banks that were labeled "Too Big To Fail". Some of the traditional power-players like the coal industry simply have a bit of historical inertia to overcome.

We've been the reducing government's ability to regulate for some time now, making the modern, milder, modern Company Town as you describe increasingly rarer as this progress.

Pxtl2• 12 years ago

To be fair, the problem is that the neighboring cities have completely failed to manage growth. The tax-bases of these places are positively exploding, but what have they done with them? Have they improved intensification in the urban core? With property values skyrocketing, builders would be lined up around the block to make condos for all these young, single developers. Better transit?

Ultimately, when the local municipalities are failing to provide the big companies with the housing and services that are needed by their employees (who are citizens and potential citizens of these municipalities) then those municipalities are failing to perform their function.

Part of this falls on FB/Apple/Google for using out-of-town campuses instead of core urban highrise office towers that would allow better access for employees in the surrounding area via the existing transit/housing infrastructure. But still - these cities have completely failed to properly work with the hand they've been dealt.

And if you want something done right, you've got to do it yourself.

e12e7• 12 years ago

And if you want something done right, you've got to do it yourself.

Especially when you don't pay any taxes, and therefore can't expect the municipality to take the cost?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2012/12/27/facebook-m...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-21/google-2-4-rate-sho...

driverdan• 12 years ago

There is a huge difference between a company town, feudalism, and Facebook building company housing. Comparing FB to them is an insult to the people that suffered under those systems.

First of all FB employees are paid very well. If they decide they don't want to work for FB anymore they could find a new job in less than a day. They can easily afford housing elsewhere. FB doesn't own all the businesses in the area and isn't paying its employees in vouchers.

pdkl955• 12 years ago

Paid very well

They pay well... if you're and engineer. And male.

From the article I linked above:

"I was promoted to a more demanding managerial position. But there would be no raise. “You’ve already doubled your salary in a year and it wouldn’t be fair to the engineers who haven’t had that raise” (never mind that a year earlier engineers had been earning anywhere from $70,000 to $140,000, as opposed to $38,000 like I had)"

$38k doesn't go terribly far in Silicon Valley. After doubling it with a promotion.

And I direct you to my other replies, where I yet again point that I didn't say it was there NOW. Instead, we face a very bad risk of them becoming a Company Town in the future. They are exhibiting dangerous warning signs, and nobody in power even attempting to stop even their flagrantly illegal activities.

surstroemming• 12 years ago

They could just start paying their taxes. Like normal people.

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/oct/08/facebook-uk-...

dopamean• 12 years ago

It seems they want to pay their taxes a la carte.

ck2• 12 years ago

It's funny how "active shooter" (aka too-common armed mass murderer) is buried in there, when it is really their primary reason since the USA will never have gun sanity.

They don't want the cop to do any kind of citations, so they just want the armed presence that is licensed to kill (which I believe statistics say is more likely to shoot a bystander).

sushirain• 12 years ago

Can firms also fund a judge position in the US? An entire police station? A prison?

puppetmaster3• 12 years ago

prevent truancy. lol.

Facebook offers to pay Menlo Park $600k to hire a cop

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