Another point in Mark Zuckerberg's creepiness

Also in Facebook news:

In Menlo Park, an affluent, mostly white city of 35,000, Facebook at one point paid workers not to live in lower-income neighborhoods near the company’s headquarters. And now, there's a police unit that is funded by Facebook to patrol the area surrounding its campus. The bill comes in at over $2 million annually—big money in a small city.

[...]

“You create a danger when you have public servants being privately funded,” J.T. Faraji, an East Palo Alto resident and founder of the activist group Real Community Coalition, told Motherboard. “It becomes the privatization of the law, and the law is supposed to work for everyone. To me, that’s a major breakdown in the system. It should be illegal for private corporations to have their own police force.”

[...]

The “Facebook Unit,” as it was nicknamed by Menlo Park police, has not gotten much attention outside of these communities, despite being one of the nation’s only privately-funded public police forces.

Public records obtained by Motherboard—hundreds of pages of notes, proposals in draft and final form, presentations, and emails between Facebook and the Menlo Park Police Department over several years—provide an unprecedented look at how the partnership was forged and how it operates, as well as at public concerns about law enforcement’s intimate ties to one of the most powerful technology companies in the world.

“This would be concerning to me as a community member,” said Chris Burbank of the Center for Policing Equity, a research consortium founded at the University of California-Los Angeles that focuses on transparency in law enforcement. “I don’t care who it is. You don’t get to buy a police department.”

  Vice

Apparently you do.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.