Facebook Bought Off The Local Police Department To Build Its Own Private Police Unit

Peter M. D'Abrosca Posted On October 24, 2019

Facebook bought off the public police department where its headquarters is built in order to create its own private police unit staffed by city police officers.

“Facebook has been accused of ‘privatizing the law’ by paying a local Silicon Valley police department $11.2 million to create an entire unit that is responsible for protecting the tech giant’s campus,” Daily Mail said. “The Menlo Park Police Department created a new fully-staffed unit, dubbed the Facebook Unit, back on August 1.”

The Facebook Unit, which is staffed by city police officers, reportedly has one sole beat: Facebook’s campus. Normally, a company the size of Facebook would hire private security to protect its campus, but apparently the company figured it was a better investment to simply buy off the local police force.

“Notes, proposals and emails between Facebook and police also flag concerns about the relationship between the two entities given the unit is one of the only privately-funded public police forces in the country,” the report said.

The Menlo Park Police Department is not averse to this setup. Why would it be? More than $11 million from Facebook is a good deal for a small city’s police force, which likely fights for budget from the city. It also believes that Facebook will eventually be the target of some kind of terrorist attack.

“It’s not a matter of if we’re going to have an armed intruder, it’s just a matter of when,” Menlo Park Police Chief Dave Bertini reportedly said. “I don’t want to focus on terrorism. We’re also worried about domestic terrorism or someone with a mental illness who shows up at the Facebook campus saying they have a meeting with (Mark) Zuckerberg.”

But once again, Americans ought to consider the slippery slope of this precedent, and how potentially dangerous it could be in the long run. Do we want large corporations owning our police forces? How long before Facebook has a privatized army? It already employs Americans with government security clearances who have access to classified information. Once again, it seems that the concentration of power in the United States is leaning more towards mega-corporations run by the ultra-wealthy, and less towards elected officials in government. This is how plutocracies are built.

If what Facebook has done to the First Amendment is any indication, it should not be trusted to have such power. It already drummed conservatives, including our own Laura Loomer, offline. It did so because it arbitrarily deemed these conservatives to be “dangerous,” and claimed that they broke vague “terms of service” rules, totally denying them the right to participate in political discourse in what is the 21st Century public square. Will a future Facebook-owned police force show up at your home to exercise similar extrajudicial power?

Facebook dismissed concerns that it might be usurping too much power.

“Our funding is not a privatization of the law,” a spokesperson reportedly told Daily Mail. “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.”