The Casper Journal :: Casper's Community Newspaper

Crime Stoppers of Central Wyoming wants to make it easier for the public to provide law enforcement with information about serious crimes.

The local organization’s Web site has been redesigned to provide an even higher level of confidentiality and ease of access.

The offshoot chapter, which started in 1982, was modeled after a program that began in Albuquerque, N.M., in 1976. No one from the public was offering information to the detectives investigating a senseless murder committed during a gas station robbery.

According to the Crime Stoppers Web site, they concluded that either the public was afraid for their own physical safety or they just didn’t care or want to get involved.

To solve the problem of fear for their well-being, tipsters were offered anonymity; to combat apathy, they were offered cash rewards.

The first information provided after a televised reenactment of the crime led to the arrest of the murderer and solved four other violent crimes. When word spread of the effort’s success, Crime Stoppers was born.

The program has worked well since it began in the 1980s in Casper. Statistics that track the successful outcome of tips since 2004 show that 1,816 cases have been cleared and 729 arrests were made in central Wyoming.

The value of property recovered and drugs seized topped $3.3 million. The success came with a minimal cost of $26,625 paid out in reward money to tipsters.

“Most people that give tips don’t request rewards,” explained Dick Webb, the Casper Police Department crime analyst who is Crime Stoppers’ part-time coordinator.

His time and office are provided free of charge to the organization by the city department.

Webb staffs the office and the secure phone line and e-mail from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday. Voice mail takes over after hours, an option that Webb said some tipsters seem to prefer.

“Some people don’t like to talk to a human,” he said.

Crime Stoppers is a partnership between the community, business, the media and the law enforcement agencies in Natrona County and central Wyoming. The nonprofit’s seven-member board makes decisions about award amounts up to $1,000.

Most of the Crime Stoppers’ funding comes from donations, including those first-time offenders who are offered the option to donate their fines to a community nonprofit if they stay out of trouble for six months.

The Web site, revamped as a community service by NextStep-Design Solutions of Casper, makes it even easier to provide tips. Webb described new TipSoft software that automatically makes the sender unidentifiable, even to the most sophisticated forensic experts.

Information goes through a server in Texas rather than the former in-house e-mail system that tracked data.

The new Web site also incorporates crimetweeter, for those who want to tweet for and about crimes. The ability to text crime information may be coming in the future when it is more economically feasible.

The Crime Stoppers Web site is interactive, as well as easy to use. The form on the site asks for specific pertinent information, allows for picture attachments and has a space to write in particulars of what happened or was seen.

There is the choice of a password so that more information can be added or follow-up questions asked by either the tipster or law enforcement.

Webb described a scenario where a tip came in that four juveniles were seen at a local store trying out baseball bats that were too short to use for the sport. A check of the store’s security tapes identified the juveniles.

The tip didn’t solve the crime, but it did give detectives working on a rash of smashed car mirrors a chance to ask more pertinent questions.

Crime Stoppers is seeing an increase in reporting since the new Web site went live. Almost everything is coming in that way rather than over the phone line, Webb said.

In the past six months, 88 tips have come in on criminal behavior, including 33 on drugs.

To report information on a crime to Crime Stoppers, call 577-TIPS or visit the Web site at www.crime-stoppers.com.

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