I was driving home from a trip to the grocery store this morning when I spotted my local Chicago Police beat car ahead of me, and I noticed he had a curious bumper sticker, on which I could make out the letters “YPOSHOT”. When I got a little closer, I could see a message about a $10,000 reward for information about anyone shooting at a Chicago police officer, which you could earn by calling in a tip to 1-888-YPO-SHOT (as in “Why Police Officer shot”).
That doesn’t seem like nearly enough. When someone killed Tupelo, Mississippi, police Corporal Kevin Stauffer and injured another officer last month after they responded to a bank robbery, the FBI offered a $50,000 reward, which was matched by the bank. With other donors, the reward grew to $162,500.
Earlier last year, after someone shot and killed a Rite-Aid store manager, the Philadelphia Citizen’s Crime Commission and Rite-Aid offered $20,000. That reminded me of a story I only vaguely remember from around 1970 about a city in which several pharmacists had been killed during robberies. The pharmacists’ association responded by offering a standing $15,000 reward for the killing or wounding of any pharmacist during a robbery. That was so much money at the time (equal to about $90,000 today) that people would turn in their own family members to get it. Very few criminals were willing to risk robbing pharmacies after that.
Then again, I suppose that offering a large reward could create its own problems. After all, in order to collect the $100,000 reward for information about the shooting of a cop, someone has to shoot a cop. I imagine there are people out there who might try to work both sides of that deal by shooting a cop and then planting the gun on someone else so they could turn them in for the reward.
In any case, 1-888-YPO-SHOT was created by Bill Kugelman, whose son was an officer killed in the line of duty, along with the Chicago Police Memorial Foundation. They apparently got the idea from the NYPD’s 1-800-COPSHOT program.
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