STAFF EDIT: End the whitewashing

On the night of March 29, a tall, heavyset man reportedly jumped out from behind a U-Haul truck on Park Drive and threatened to assault a School of Law student unless she turned over her purse. A few hours later, another woman reported a sexual assault in Brookline very close to Commonwealth Avenue. On April 1, Dean of Students Kenneth Elmore responded to both crimes in an email to the student body, revisiting the same story undergraduates and graduates have heard many times before: The campus is no more dangerous than in recent years, but still watch out for each other.

The administration may have announced these crimes with good intentions, but its actual handling of the reported assaults was irresponsible. Instead of announcing the reported crimes immediately to all media outlets, the Boston University Police Department sat on the information for days. Yesterday, Elmore sent a note about the crimes in a university-wide email. In the message, Elmore pointed students to an even more misleading article on BU Today, the administration-run public relations website, that sought to reassure parents and students that the areas around campus remain safe despite recent dangerous incidents. The headline was a comic understatement: “Students asked to look out for one another after weekend crimes.”

It was not the first time the administration has sat on urgent safety information. The last time administration officials felt a reported robbery or assault near campus warranted notifying students, BUPD waited until March 17 to do so. Police responded to the crimes on March 8.

This troubling lack of transparency is more than just a harmless public relations stunt. University authorities are hurting their own crime-fighting efforts by glossing over the timing and details of these assaults. Police would have had a much better chance at catching the alleged assaulters had authorities notified students the day after the attacks were reported, rather than giving the suspects a few days to change their clothes and steer clear of the area. Now that the news is more than four days old, other students are unlikely to recognize the assailants and alert the police.

Every student knows it is safer to walk in groups than alone and earlier in the day rather than later. Telling students they should stick together on a seldom-read university website will not make students safer. The best way for the university to encourage safety — aside from increasing police patrols in dangerous areas — is to aggressively publicize all crimes and their locations so students can avoid them at certain times of night.

The kind of information administration news releases neglected to mention — or buried deep within their texts — was exactly what students need to know the most: Which areas have become most dangerous during the past few months, when were the most recent crimes committed and why were the unnamed victims unable to find help in time?

This incident is only the latest example of a troubling pattern of secrecy the university has yet to abandon. When The Daily Free Press revealed March 27 that researchers at the BU Medical Campus have accepted funding from tobacco giant Philip Morris, officials from the Medical Campus failed to provide a response after more than a week of inquiries. The school only reluctantly released a statement defending its funding when The Boston Globe inquired a day after the story broke.

This fear of sunlight extends well beyond matters that would embarrass the university; college authorities sometimes bar the student press from attending or inquiring about simple events and changes in dining arrangements. Before the Free Press announced March 28 that the Taco Bell at Warren Towers will be replaced with a Starbucks, an administration official asked the paper to refrain from telling students about the change “for just a few weeks” as a courtesy to Taco Bell. The newspaper chose to report the news instead, with or without the administration’s help.

This behavior must end. If the university wants to maintain its good image, barring reporters from doing their jobs is not the way to do it. Providing students with up-to-date information on crime will not hurt the university’s reputation. Students from graduates to prospective undergraduates know enough about the university to understand it is in an urban campus and crime is inevitable. Positive developments at the university deserve to be publicized; the Free Press staff is waiting to highlight them. All we need is the administration’s cooperation.