BSA reacts to students stealing from the donation bin for victims
By: Olivia Shackleton
Generous amounts of boxes of wipes, cases of water and hand sanitizer have piled up in the donation box in the atrium of the D.J. Lombardo Student Center. This is due to the Black Students in Action’s collection of these items, as well as monetary donations, for their “1,000 Days Flint” fundraiser. April 24, 2017 designates the three year mark for the people of Flint, Mich. being without clean, usable water.
BSA is focusing on becoming a more service-based organization. Therefore, they decided to launch a fundraiser to help the people of Flint. Once the donation bin began to fill up, members of BSA realized that some of the cases of water had holes in the plastic packaging and were missing several bottles of water. At first, members believed this was due to students donating the water remaining in their dorm rooms instead of donating completely new cases. A few days later, members of BSA noticed people rummaging through the donation bin.
Emmanuel Brown, president of BSA, recalled this incident saying, “It was very alarming. Immediately I sent out an email to JCUPD expressing that there has been people taking from our bin and we were asking that [security] footage to be looked at so that we can confirm this and move forward with the process.”
The email sent to JCUPD did not get a response over spring break or after break ended, and the thefts continued to happen more frequently once students returned from break. Naudia Loftis, secretary of BSA, met with officers from JCUPD to discuss the situation.
Loftis recalled her visits to JCUPD saying, “They told me they did not get the email Manny sent. Once I told them that people were stealing water, they kinda laughed… other officers were coming in and asked what was going on and they said there were water thefts and began to giggle.” Loftis visited JCUPD on a daily basis for an entire week. She was frustrated by the lack of cooperation by JCU PD and demanded to see the security tapes herself, since they had not been helpful over the course of the past six days.
Only after members of BSA were given the opportunity to view the security footage did the investigation make progress since JCUPD was not able to recognize students and perpetrators outside of the JCU community as easily as members of BSA could.
Deputy Director Ross Carbone of JCUPD expressed his displeasure with the situation saying, “Anytime somebody is stealing from a donation bin, it is serious. It is unfortunate that when a group is trying to do good work they have to consider some of these occurrences as a cost of doing business.”
BSA is frustrated with the lack of response from the John Carroll community as a whole. Brown wrote a statement about the thefts to be published in Inside JCU, but administration cut out the entire paragraph addressing the thefts and only highlighted the service piece. “That is another thing this institution has done to discourage student leaders to not participate in service projects,” reflected Brown.
The hashtag #notlivingthemission was started by BSA to draw attention to the lack of empathy from administration and JCUPD as well as to highlight the injustice of the thefts.
The BSA held a protest on Monday, March 27 in the atrium and cafeteria holding signs with “#notlivingthemission” and pictures of tweets about the thefts.
