How do you know which one to choose? Are you sure the DA will side with you if you blow the whistle? Will you or your employer suffer retaliation from the county law enforcement you just outed? Maybe you're blacklisted from future security gigs by being known as someone who rats on cops.
Whenever government officials solicit bribes from private citizens, the enormous power asymmetry there should lead us to prosecuting just the government official(s).
Of course it's not always this simple. Sometimes the private citizen wields more power than the civil servant they're bribing. In other words, the Mafia or other organized crime. But I'm not ready to put Apple in that column yet.
In Apple's case, you could refer back to Apple's business conduct training program, a self directed online class which ALL of us are REQUIRED to pass ANNUALLY, and which states in no uncertain terms that NOTHING of value may be paid to a government official without prior approval from higher up, and describes precisely such "facilitation fees".
And if the article is to be believed, the Apple officer in question was in charge of CREATING that class. I'm sorry; I don't think I've ever met them, but I don't see how this could possibly be excused, unless Apple Legal signed off on that bribe (stranger things have happened — Apple's then General Counsel once created a backdated paper trail for a fictitious meeting of the executive team — but still find that exceedingly unlikely).
I forgot about this - the Apple options backdating scandal:
You're kidding me? You actually believe the upper management follows this shit? It's a checkbox to make sure you have a "good working environment.
You know how I know that it's some BS? Two of the Chief X Officers at a previous job both met their current partners at a job... they were pregnant at their weddings.
More on that Story?
I actually met Heinen on my first day at work — back then, Apple was small enough that it was customary for a member of the executive team to drop in to new employee orientation each Monday.
This is why you go directly to the FBI.
California has counties which are "may-issue" (getting your permit is decided on a case-by-case "need" basis by the local sheriff) vs. "shall-issue" (must be issued to the applicant if they have done paperwork correctly and pass background checks). Shall-issue has a very obvious flaw, which is on full display in this case.
Similar things happen in the planning department and public works department in San Francisco. Supervisors will receive half-price homes laundered through their parents, that sort of thing. Pretty transparent for the Third World (where sophisticated criminal agents will extract some of the value if they know you have some ill-gotten gains) but certainly sufficient for present-day US (where rule of law is generally available).
> The Planning Department, Department of Public Health, and the City Administrator's Office have all been hit with subpoenas stemming from the sprawling federal investigation into corruption in San Francisco government.
> ...
> The City Attorney's Office's simultaneous investigation has already revealed a relationship between former Public Works director Mohammed Nuru and local entrepreneur Nick Bovis, in which Bovis appears to have taken donations from his charity (Lefty O'Doul's Foundation for Kids), given by city contractors, and funneled them to cover DPW holiday parties. Now it looks like the feds are following up on this pattern and trying to see if there are more examples of city vendors possibly disguising bribes that benefited city employees as charitable gifts.
https://sfist.com/2020/07/15/ongoing-fbi-corruption-probe-hi...
It also changes as new sheriffs are elected. Where I live, the previous sheriff was known to reject applications, but the current one is known for the opposite stance.
On one hand the CCW permit is for the personal benefit of the person receiving it. If the company needed armed staff, they could simply hire full-time armed guards. There is no reason head of security at Apple needs to be armed using a concealed weapon. They are not going undercover to bust smugglers or whatever.
On the other hand, the payment was to the Sherriff's office, not the sheriff himself. That makes it a lot less like bribery to me because it still benefits the government.
What makes it especially tricky is that it seems as though the Sherriff asked for the payment. If they did and provided official written documentation to Apple, that feels like a professional and real agreement to provide hardware to the government.
At the end of the day, what will make this bad for Apple's head of security is that he was personally benefiting from the Sherriff's actions by receiving favorable treatment for a CCW he didn't need, and used company hardware to get that favorable treatment.
> There is no reason head of security at Apple needs to be armed
That’s up to them, they can decide what kind of arms are carried.