Bought a Police Force

One evening in June 2015, a man left Facebook’s sprawling technology campus in Menlo Park, California with two baby-blue bicycles. They were part of a shared fleet offered as a corporate perk; employees aren’t supposed to ride them off the property, but many ignore this rule, abandoning them around town to the ire of Facebook’s neighbors.

That night, Facebook’s security guards reported the bicycles as stolen. And after pinging their coordinates on GPS trackers, they alerted the Menlo Park Police Department, saying the company intended to prosecute. A police officer quickly found a Hispanic man and arrested him for larceny.

It’s common for residents to opportunistically use Facebook’s discarded bicycles, and for years police routinely stopped people—notably young people of color, according to some community accounts—for riding them, fomenting fears about racial profiling. The bicycles became an unexpected symbol of police tension in Menlo Park and East Palo Alto, where people of color feel criminalized under the shadow of immense technology wealth.

The 2015 incident, which Facebook denies any knowledge of, is notable because of what happened after the arrest: Nothing. The man, it turned out, was a Facebook contract worker. According to Menlo Park police documents that Motherboard obtained through a public records request, “when representatives from Facebook learned that [the man] was a Facebook employee they requested that no criminal charges be brought against him,” and he was released. 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.

The Bay Area has long been a sandbox for technology giants who are no longer merely occupying communities, but building and reshaping them. 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.

This deeply unusual relationship has highlighted issues of policing ethics and thrown disparities between Menlo Park and neighboring East Palo Alto into stark relief. When Menlo Park police began confronting people for riding Facebook bicycles off-campus, for instance, residents of East Palo Alto, a primarily Black and Latinx community, worried that law enforcement was racially profiling people who did not appear to them as Facebook employees.

“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.”

(“Our funding is not a privatization of the law,” Facebook spokesperson Anthony Harrison told Motherboard. “We have a long-term commitment to Menlo Park, and we want it to remain a safe and inclusive environment for everyone who calls it home.”)

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.”