This article is an interesting example of using careful wording to paint one side as maximally sympathetic and the other as maximally unsympathetic. It's the kind of thing that should be read in high school classes to help train critical thinking.<p>In the beginning, there is not much information, but an extraordinary amount of editorialization, where neutral things get adjectives slapped onto them to make the reader know what side they're supposed to be on. I went through and collated them:<p>> dutiful compliance occupying communities mostly white deeply unusual isolated campus imperial fashion latest conquest snatched up alarming sinister in its own image manipulation tiny technotopia<p>In the middle, there's the classic catch-22. Facebook is causing gentrification and "displacing families" when its employees move into poor communities. But when its employees choose to move in elsewhere, it is an "isolated" "tiny techtopia" that is "excluding the communities from their wealth". As usual you are damned if you do and damned if you don't.<p>Later, it finally concedes that bikes actually are constantly stolen from Facebook, which is the whole point of its actions in the first place, but goes to great lengths to avoid calling it stealing:<p>> "You have an extremely poor community that is being flooded with toys of wealth, and these things are going to happen"<p>> "teens in low-income areas [...] should not be detained or ticketed for, say, using a Facebook bicycle to get to school"<p>> "[parents should not have to worry] about their kids having a bad interaction with the police over a stupid bike"<p>I live in Menlo Park (though not a tech employee) and almost had my bike stolen last week. I would be pissed off if the police caught the thief and let them off because it's "a stupid bike". It's how I commute, I can't function without it, and I can't just buy another one.<p>In the end I can't find any reason to be upset -- I don't think there's a difference between ~10,000 Menlo Park residents independently complaining to the police about theft, and Facebook (who hires ~10,000 Menlo Park residents) merely collating them. Facebook isn't getting a say in Menlo Park affairs because it's a big corporation, it's because its employees make up a significant share of the population. That is fair.
One other way to look at this narrative is "Facebook provides bicycles as an employee benefit. They are to be used only by employees. When someone took them off campus, Facebook assumed theft and notified the local police. When they discovered that the person was in fact a Facebook employee and entitled to the use of the bicycle, they dropped the charges."<p>You can still argue about the legitimacy of private corporate-owned property as an employee benefit at all, along with the potential racial profiling that led people to assume that a Hispanic man was not a Facebook employee. But I'm not sure that their actions would've been all that different if it had been a white brogrammer that took the bike home - they'd probably call the police, the police would investigate, and if it was found to be an employee, the charges would be dropped.
Facebook should be called to account if they broke any laws and were not prosecuted for it. I don't see any evidence of that in the article. What I do see is an article heavy on racial overtones, as if trying to manufacture outrage at Facebook.<p>What should a large company do in this case? Who should pay for the extra civic services that a company's presence causes? Residents?
> Menlo Park, an affluent, mostly white city of 35,000<p>To repeat from the previous time this was posted: According to their own source, Menlo Park is 70% white, but this includes Hispanics, who make up 18%. Assuming they were mostly counted under white, this leaves whites as barely over half of the residents - certainly less than the 61% non-Hispanic white of the US as a whole [1]. So why does Vice try to frame Menlo Park as some sort of white stronghold, when it's less white than the US on average?<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_States#Race_and_ethnicity" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_State...</a>
> The dutiful compliance of the police—first chasing after Facebook property that Facebook employees left around the community as litter, then standing down when told by Facebook that the culprit was part of a special, protected class—is a minor instantiation of a broader issue: Just how intertwined Facebook and local police have become.<p>I don’t get this characterization at all. Facebook thought that some of its bikes were missing, thought they were stolen, contacted the police, and told the police to do nothing when they figured out the bike was being used by a Facebook employee. How is this problematic or even not normal?
Constant emphasis on 'people of color' makes it hard to read and dilutes the main point. Such obsession to view everything through the length of race is mind boggling. This is seems to be a US thing.<p>I mean, you steal a bike, you are responsible. Whether you're mostly brown, mostly white or mostly blue is irrelevant. As simple as that.
Calling the "Facebook police unit" - a group of city police officers assigned to the Facebook campus - the "privatization of the law" is quite overblown, especially when compared to the actual private police departments that exist across the United States.<p>If the residents of Menlo Park don't like how their police department operates, then they can elect new city leadership to change the police department accordingly.<p>Compare that to university police, which is often controlled by the university trustees. Who elects the trustees? It usually isn't the undergraduates, which comprise the majority of the university's population. Whether it's the state governor, legislature, or alumni, the decisionmakers charged with administering the police power do not answer to those against whom that power is used.<p>It gets worse with railroad police, which are wholly owned, funded, and operated by private railroad companies, and have national jurisdiction.<p>The powers of the state should never be in the hands of a private corporation, organization, or university, but what's happening at Facebook isn't that at all.
>The dutiful compliance of the police—first chasing after Facebook property that Facebook employees left around the community as litter, then standing down when told by Facebook that the culprit was part of a special, protected class<p>Wow, I didn't realize we were already living in a corporate anime dystopia. I mean I knew it was on the way, but holy cow I guess it already happened.
What’s really astonishing to me is Facebook can’t develop a mobile app to secure the bikes to prevent unauthorized riding and to hold their employees accountable for littering the city with discarded bikes.
This is something that could be mutual opportunity, instead it has become a conflict.<p>What does a bicycle cost F13?
What is preventing F13 from providing bikes and shopping carts to the community , as a service?<p>Why would F13 want to pass up the opportunity for data?
If you're rich enough you not only get to ignore laws you don't like, you get your own police force to do your dirty work. Whether that's kicking out Latinos in Menlo Park today or rounding up slaves back in the days America was "great," it's a long-standing tradition with roots going back hundreds of years in America.