Boston University announced on Wednesday that it will give a $10,000 reward for information leading to the capture of the armed robbers.
The reward is a step in the right direction, as it will give the BU community more incentive to cooperate with police in putting an end to these incidents. However, one would hope the reward is not an excuse for police to rely upon students and staff for leads.
Hopefully, the police will actively search for leads and not just wait by the phone lines. While BU students have eyes and ears in places the police departments do not, tracking down the perpetrators is a responsibility that should fall on police departments’ shoulders, not students’.
More importantly, one must wonder how effective the reward offer will be. After all, what more incentive do students need than knowing that cooperating to the best of their ability will keep them safe?
With each robbery, students grew more and more concerned about their safety. The fourth robbery elicited demands from students and parents for the police to show more transparency.
Those demands likely are what led to BU’s decision to offer up the $10,000 and the police department’s release of surveillance footage — footage that was caught on Friday. Footage that could have been released over the weekend, but that instead went public five days later after another robbery occurred.
Releasing the footage earlier may even have prevented the fourth robbery from happening or at least could have given students a better idea of what to look for and what kind of clothing the suspects were wearing, not to mention their build and height (details police have not described in the reports). Students could have crossed paths with the robbers over the weekend and not have known it because the footage was not available to them at that time.
While it is not surprising that the university has offered up a monetary award, one hopes that answers will turn up soon and the campus will not hear about a fifth armed robbery attempt.
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Robbers know students can’t protect themselves with a gun, so they are easy prey. I wonder what would happen if students were allowed to concealed carry as they can on other campuses.
Attitudes change on this issue after you have been mugged.