Comment by knzhou | Hacker News Reader

Comment by knzhou | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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:

> 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

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.

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:

> "You have an extremely poor community that is being flooded with toys of wealth, and these things are going to happen"

> "teens in low-income areas [...] should not be detained or ticketed for, say, using a Facebook bicycle to get to school"

> "[parents should not have to worry] about their kids having a bad interaction with the police over a stupid bike"

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.

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.

> I don't think there's a difference between ~10,000 residents independently complaining about theft, and Facebook (who hires ~10,000 Menlo Park residents) merely collating them.

With respect - if you don’t see a difference between stealing an individual citizen’s bike and stealing one from a fleet owned by a company worth half a trillion dollars, perhaps you should be the one working on critical thinking skills instead of lecturing others.

Legally, I see no difference. It's a matter of equality under the law. Everyone, including corporations, has the same property rights as everyone else, all theft is illegal. This is beneficial for decreasing instability and corruption in a society.

I would guess your underlying contention is the wealth disparity, but that is a different issue with better solutions than weakening property rights for rich people or corporations.

And prefacing your comment with 'with respect' does not excuse accusing those who disagree with you of having inadequate 'critical thinking skills'.

Legally doesn't mean anything in this scenario. What you should be doing is looking at how the police execute these things in practice.

Which is that typically the police don't give a single shit about stolen bikes or anything like that unless you're rich or, apparently, Facebook. The poor already have weaker property rights than the rich, because if they were to report their bikes as being stolen the police would scoff at them and continue doing jack shit. Or worse, if you're a minority.

And generally speaking, Facebook encouraging confrontations with the police which are historically very dangerous for minorities even if they've done absolutely nothing wrong is probably a bad idea.

> Which is that typically the police don't give a single shit about stolen bikes or anything like that unless you're rich or, apparently, Facebook. The poor already have weaker property rights than the rich, because if they were to report their bikes as being stolen the police would scoff at them and continue doing jack shit. Or worse, if you're a minority.

This is just totally wrong. Police have scoffed at all property theft I've ever reported to them, and it wasn't due to malice, it was because doing anything about it was basically impossible. I suppose I could have demanded they spend 10 hours a week scanning Craigslist for my stuff, but that is a waste of time for them. The same applies to everybody I know who has had stuff stolen.

Facebook's bikes are different because they very obviously belong to Facebook and are clearly, visibly being used. It's like cattle branding, it makes it much easier to recover property.

If you very obviously branded your bike so that it was completely and indistinguishably yours, do you think the police would bother to hunt down the person who stole your bike?

Because from my experience and knowledge, the answer to that would be a firm 'No'.

I'm getting very confused with all of your comments. Do you want more policing of theft in poor communities, such as East Palo Alto, or less? I currently live in the rich part of Menlo Park (thank god for subsidized housing). Do you think there should be more policing of bike theft there, or less?

At some point, I thought your point was that more policing in poor communities was bad, because disparate impact on them is the problem. But later you seem to be saying that more policing in rich communities is the problem, because they get better service. And now you seem to be saying that actually, there isn't enough policing in my (rich) community. From my perspective your position has flipped three times.

My position hasn't 'flipped' at all. I'll break it down into two points.

The first is that you claimed the police would do something about these thefts if the item was easily identifiable and visibly used. My counter argument is that even if you had a bike that was perfectly unique and identifiable, that the police wouldn't do anything unless you were wealthy and/or a corporation which has increased influence on them.

The second point is that Facebook attempting to police this behavior and bend the local police to its will has a net negative effect for the local population, because as the article points out, the police are racially profiling people in order to figure out if someone stole the bike or not, and are harassing/arresting people because of it.

You're trying to break down a complex argument into something black/white as 'more policing/less', which is also exactly what your original argument did in trying to play down the arguments the Vice article was bringing up. My point has been that it's never that simple, and allowing corporations or the rich to influence how the law is executed is a Bad Thing because it leads to two different classes of citizens when it comes to law enforcement.

Thanks for clarifying. My response has two points as well.

The first is that thinking about "Facebook" as ordering more policing is misleading, because its influence in this case is not more than the 10,000 residents would have had individually. In any case, if there were 10,000 new residents in a town who experienced a lot of theft, they could band together to demand better police services, and you would expect more officers to be hired. I don't think there's a difference here if those residents are represented by a "community leader" or a Facebook HR employee. It's collective action either way, and its power fundamentally comes from people living in Menlo Park, not Facebook's valuation.

The second is that more or less policing of petty theft is always going to have a disproportionate impact on poorer communities, because people from such communities commit most of it. This is not a moral judgment or a talking point or anything else -- it is simply a fact, one which even the community leaders quoted in this article are perfectly aware of, despite trying to word around it.

This is the contradiction that I'm trying to point out here. There are many examples in this thread of middle/upper-middle class people experiencing property theft. The majority of the time, when you can track where the property went, it's a poorer community. So in your preferred situation where even individual, middle-class citizens can get the police to spend hours hounding down their stolen bikes, it would look a lot like richer people sending their police into poorer communities to "harass" the people there, which you also said was a bad result. To repeat, there is no way for police action against petty theft to fall equally on the rich and poor, because richer people don't need or want to do it in the first place. That's why I don't know what you actually want.

While I agree with the general premise that the police pay more attention to property crime affecting businesses rather than people, most people that own bikes don't 1) paint them in very identifiable colors, and 2) have GPS trackers built into them to aid recovery.

It's substantially easier for the police to find Facebook's bikes than a regular, unmarked bike; conversely, it's exceedingly difficult to recover a bike that has no tracking or special identifying features.

This ^ ^ It's important to understand that yes, legal pedants are correct in "theft is theft", except that the police asymmetrically enforce it against the poor, no matter which side of the theft the poor is on.

Elsewhere on this thread I'm being told by the asme poster than we need more policing of theft -- apparently, having less policing of theft in poor communities is the problem, because that means the rich get better police service.

This is the thing I can never understand in these debates: I never have the slightest clue whether the people I'm talking with want more policing or less. It seems to switch every few minutes.

I prefer to focus on the concrete actions that individuals do. In this news story, Facebook is not exerting any influence beyond what 10,000 residents of Menlo Park would have (in fact, probably far less), so there is no need to bring in extra narrative structure.

I mean, I can play this game too. When I have my bike stolen, I report it to the police and just have to buy another one. But when a few overworked HR people have their 10th bike stolen of the week, they report it to the police and in turn get smeared in hit pieces without any opportunity to defend themselves, by an media industry worth $1 trillion. Why is the little guy getting crushed by these corporate behemoths?

The point is, if you play with narrative like this, the little guy can be whoever you want it to be. That's why narratives are fundamentally dishonest.

If they like their bikes, secure them.

>neutral things get adjectives slapped onto them

This is so common in the news media now. It's like the author has to be so sure that you're feeling the exact emotions that they want you to feel about something that the writing comes off as clumsy and spoonfeedy.

NYT is one of the absolute worst offenders, I didn't think Vice was that bad. I guess not

There’s an audience for what i call “poverty porn” that attributes a condescending nobility to poverty.

End of the day, people are stealing bikes.

End of the day, they’re stealing bread. Sending them to a prison colony on the other side of the planet is perfectly justified.

No mention of the reason they are stealing bread because reminding the population of the exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoise is forbidden!

Have you ever lived in these places? I have. Nobody is starving. The place is a little cheap, perhaps, but that means that it's only 10 times richer than what my parents and their parents had growing up -- and they weren't starving either. At the end of the day, I don't think there is a huge moral difference between being 10x richer than a third worlder and 20x.

Folks doing stuff like stealing bikes aren't just stealing from bourgeoise Facebook people.

One of the reasons that regressive policing, etc happen is that "the proletariat" in the community are also sick of having their shit stolen. The (legit) complaints come later.

sir bikes are not bread

And being non-white doesn’t make you a thief.

But sure, focus on the fact that a contractor took two bikes home, and not on the disproportionate response.

  I would be pissed off if the police caught the thief and let him go

So would I, given that policy is to not respond at all to simple property crime, even car break-ins. (When it's not Facebook property.)

All they do is have you enter a report on their web site and print it for your insurer, if any.

Welcome to corporate media where spin IS the substance! At least it’s not “terrorism”, “democracy”, “national security”, or “freedom” related.

Why can’t Facebook keep track of its own bikes? Cops don’t scale like gps does.

I also object to associating everything bad with "corporations". This particular article is almost falling over with spin because its single author wrote it that way.

> Why can’t Facebook keep track of its own bikes? Cops don’t scale like gps does.

Things don't magically become easier because you're part of a corporation. Try replacing the word "Facebook" with "10,000 Menlo Park residents", does it still sound obvious how to prevent bike theft? I sure hope when my bike does eventually get stolen, you won't tell me the same thing.

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