The MSU Department of Police and Public Safety is running a protection racket.

At the beginning of every year, the DPPS sends out a bulletin saying that all bikes on campus must be registered for a fee of $2. It claims this registration is to protect the bikes against theft and other forms of chicanery, but there is a stipulation that goes along with this registration.

The stipulation? DPPS will impound your bike if you don’t register it. It doesn’t leave students much of a choice, thus making it a protection racket.

The mob uses the same scheme to extort local businesses of money, it demands that the business owners pay a monthly fee for “protection,” but if it refuses that protection they find their shops vandalized, shipments stolen, etc. Kind of like how the DPPS will steal your bike if you don’t pay it to register it for you.

I know that $2 doesn’t seem like a lot of money. Most people can part with $2 and not blink, but think about $2 multiplied by 40,000 students. That’s $80,000 of protection money - not a bad racket. Granted, not every student enrolled at MSU has a bike, but the next time you go around campus look around at all the bike racks you see, chances are they’re full.

I’ll leave you to guess the amount of money the university pulls in from those bikes through its gracious offer of “pay us to protect it, or we’ll take it away from you.”

Steve Soldwedel
journalism senior