MENLO PARK, Calif. _ It started with a Facebook post.
In early December, East Palo Alto Planning Commission member Kyra Brown was driving through Menlo Park when she spotted it: Four police cars, a fire truck and an ambulance surrounding a young black man in handcuffs. On the ground nearby, one of the baby-blue bikes Facebook provides to its employees lay on the ground.
Officers had stopped the man, who was eventually released, to ask whether he was a Facebook employee, said Menlo Park Police Chief Dave Bertini. Non-employees caught riding the bikes can be charged with misappropriating lost property, he said, or worse, bike theft. The man became uncooperative, which is why officers placed him in handcuffs, Bertini said. But, it got Brown thinking, "How many people has this happened to?"
She posted several photos of the incident to her Facebook page, which was subsequently picked up in a local Facebook group and on the social media website, Nextdoor, eventually leading to a community forum in East Palo Alto earlier this month. To Brown, it's an issue that wouldn't exist without the company's policy of allowing only its employees to use the bikes and of those same employees leaving them on sidewalks, in front of stores and elsewhere around town.
"This is a hard-core example of tech companies leading to gentrification which is then leading to over-policing," Brown said.
For its part, a Facebook spokesman told this news organization the company has never asked Menlo Park or East Palo Alto police to stop, detain or arrest people who are not employees for riding their bikes. Nor is the company willing to prosecute such cases _ a sentiment that was shared at the February community forum. As a result, Bertini told his officers to stop investigating such cases.
"Without a victim," Bertini said. "There's no crime."
It's unclear, though, just how many people Menlo Park officers have stopped in the past on the ubiquitous baby-blue bikes. The department doesn't have a way to readily differentiate in their logs who the bikes belong to, Bertini said. Those contacts typically didn't result in arrests, he said; the bikes were confiscated and the person was issued a warning or citation and sent on their way.
But, that's not really the point, Brown said. East Palo Alto, Menlo Park and surrounding communities are adding tech campuses by the dozen, it seems. If not Facebook, then it could be another tech company, she said. She's working with East Palo Alto Mayor Lisa Gauthier to broaden the conversation to surrounding communities, Gauthier said.
"We have to address this now before it gets to be an even bigger issue," Brown said.
In nearby Mountain View, police use similar tactics for Google's employee bikes, said department spokeswoman Katie Nelson. Officers are trained to look out for employee badges, she said, but, depending on the situation, officers do sometimes stop people riding the company's bright, multi-colored bikes. The person is either issued a warning or a citation, or arrested, she said. They then work with Google's bicycle recovery team to return the bikes.
"It is very much a case-by-case basis," she said. "In all cases, the bike is returned to Google."
It's common to see young people or other non-Facebook employees riding the company's bikes around town, said East Palo Alto resident LaShauna Black. They're often left on sidewalks or piled against buildings. Menlo Park resident Analis Roman said she sometimes see grocery store workers leaving them behind Mi Tierra Linda, which specializes in foods imported from Central America.
So, it's understandable that some residents think anyone can use them, Black said, despite language written on the bikes saying they are for employees' use on its campus only.
"The bikes are everywhere," she said. "They're accessible."
And, it's no secret teenagers and middle school students often use them to get to school, said Heather Starnes-Logwood, the executive director of Live in Peace, a social services nonprofit focused on youth empowerment in East Palo Alto. Her organization had noticed the same thing, long before Brown's post heightened the visibility around this issue, and had been thinking about how to set up a bike program to give local youth easier access to their own bikes.
The organization secured a grant in July to open a bike repair workshop, where young people could gain experience working on bikes and leave with one to call their own. They moved into a warehouse roughly two miles from Facebook's Menlo Park campus, in October, she said. A group from Kansas University arrived in January to build work benches. But, they also needed tools and a batch of bikes to kick off the program. The benefactor they found? That'd be Facebook.
"It was kind of the perfect storm," Starnes-Logwood said. "We've needed a bike repair shop since forever."
After Brown's post, the company then decided to further support Live in Peace's bike program by offering a sort of bike-exchange program, where youth could show up to Live in Peace's bike repair shop on a Facebook bike, put in some time learning how to repair bikes and walk away with a free bike, she said. The nonprofit, along with Facebook and East Palo Alto police are also handing out "golden tickets" to youth in the city to redeem at the bike shop where they can claim a bike of their own.
But Brown is hoping the program _ or something similar _ could be more widespread. And, she's hoping the surrounding communities of Palo Alto and Mountain View will take Menlo Park's approach and adopt policies of non-enforcement when they see people riding tech companies' bikes.
"There are more than young people riding these bikes," Brown said. "We still need an action plan for how to address this."
