Menlo Park PD's “Facebook Unit”, partly funded by the company, comes under fire by Black Lives Matters protestors, who say it endangers people of color
Facebook's entanglement with its hometown police department is the sharpest local instance of a pattern the current protests have dragged into view: as company officials issued statements supporting protesters, their funding of law enforcement came under simultaneous scrutiny. The company's ties to Menlo Park run deep — it pledged 1,500 units of public housing to win city support for its headquarters expansion — and a partially company-funded police unit extends that municipal relationship into policing itself.
First-order effects
Black Lives Matter protesters are directly targeting the Facebook-funded unit, forcing both Facebook and Menlo Park PD to defend or reconsider an arrangement that was previously low-profile.
Second-order effects
The criticism collides with Facebook's own record on race — internal documents showed it unfairly censoring black users (per the ProPublica reporting) and it has admitted confusing anti-racism advocacy with attacks (its own admission) — so the company's defense of a police partnership undermines its stated support for protesters and hands critics a concrete example.
Third-order effects
If the pattern from the broader protest-week coverage holds, tech companies face pressure to unwind formal funding relationships with police departments, turning corporate-police partnerships from a quiet civic norm into a reputational liability that boards must audit.
The trend: The 2020 protest wave is converting tech companies' civic entanglements with law enforcement — funding, data sharing, hometown policing — into public accountability fights.
1. It seems to have been lost down the memory hole, but last year the Plain View Project examined the Facebook pages of 1000s of police officers from several police departments around the country. The findings were extraordinary. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ...
Protesters targeted Mark Zuckerberg's mansion over the weekend telling Facebook to stop funding police. The company has its own department dubbed the “Facebook Unit.” https://onezero.medium.com/...
NEW: Don't forget that Facebook funds a public police force in Menlo Park. Facebook's direct role in expanding policing powers is very real to Black and Latino residents in East Palo Alto. On Sunday, hundreds of people marched to Mark Zuckerberg's house https://onezero.medium.com…
Facebook aggressively pushed for Menlo Park to expand its police force, despite strong opposition from communities of color. Community organizers are demanding that the company stop contributing money that supports policing activities in any form. https://read.medium.com/BJYPkoA
Facebook funds a police force known as the “Facebook Unit” that “patrols the area surrounding the company's billion-dollar headquarters.” Things are less plush in neighboring East Palo Alto, where poverty has risen for years. Great story by @SarahNEmerson https://onezero.medium.c…