KERRY M. KIRSPEL THE INQUISITOR
When police need assistance from the public, they rely on tips that come in through Crime Stoppers.
The service allows citizens to anonymously alert police to information about local crimes, including the identity and/or whereabouts of a potential suspect.
The key to the service’s success is its insistence on anonymity. No one wants to be targeted by criminals for retribution for “squealing,” and Crime Stoppers takes all possible precautions to maintain that anonymity for all callers.
And it works.
Actually, Crime Stoppers is an organization separate from the Shreveport Police Department. Reed Ebarb, president of Caddo-Shreveport Crime Stoppers, said it is a non-profit organization that pays rewards to tipsters and allows them to remain anonymous while providing information on crimes to law enforcement agencies.
“The way it works is, you call them on an anonymous line or you anonymously submit a tip online. We ensure that information goes to the correct department, the correct detective,” he said.
“You are assigned a number at that time corresponding to your tip. At that point, if the tip does lead to an arrest, you’re told to call back in in a couple of weeks, and you provide that number again, and we tell you it’s closed by arrest, and we give you instructions for picking up cash money — again, anonymously — at a local bank using that number.
“That’s pretty much the program,” Ebarb said. “You’re identified by number, not by name or any other identification.”
He said the more serious the crime, the higher the reward.
And that reward has grown in recent years. This year the maximum reward amount was increased to $2,000. “The effect of that was, every crime now is eligible for double the money,” Ebarb said. “So what used to maybe be a $50 tip is now a $100 tip, and things that used to pay $500 or $600 now pay a thousand dollars.”
Often, the Shreveport Police Department will announce through the local media the need for information regarding a specific crime. Does Crime Stoppers only accept information for these publicized crimes, or can the public call in information about any crime? “Any crime, if it leads to an arrest and it’s a crime, we take it. Ninety-plus percent of our tips are on crimes that we haven’t advertised at all. It may be narcotics dealing in the neighborhood. Somebody has a friend that stole something, and they want to let us know. It’s all kinds of things like that.”
With the increase in the rewards, has there been an appreciable increase in the numbers of tips received? Ebarb said there has. “2019 was a big year for us. 2020 is turning into another recordbreaking year. By the end of the year, we will surpass 100 tips closed by arrest. We’ve paid out thousands and thousands of dollars in tips. This has definitely been a big year for us.”
Even though Crime Stoppers stresses anonymity to its tipsters, are some people still scared to submit tips, even anonymously, for fear of retribution? “We believe some people are afraid or retribution, but we’ve found that there a lot of cases that Shreveport police go out on. Nobody wants to talk about what they saw, what they know, but sometimes in the hours or days after a crime occurs, we see people getting online and submitting tips with very detailed information about that crime. So we know the anonymity factor is a big part of it,” Ebarb said.
“One factor that I’ll throw out that I don’t talk about much, more than 70 percent of our tips go unclaimed. People give us the information, then they don’t want it, they don’t want a reward, they just want the information to be known. And that’s a big thing as well.”
The leftover, unclaimed reward money rolls back into the till and stays in that account.
Apart from the fear of retribution, some people also do not want to called a “snitch.” Does Ebarb find the same thing applies to this situation? “From what we can gather, we’ve been able to cut that out a lot. We’ve seen with a lot of people, they don’t want to be a snitch, but since we have the ability to somewhat limited interact with our tipsters, we’ve found that a lot of them are people who are just tired of the crime, they’re tired of the killings and the drug dealing, and they’ve just had it. They’ve put in a tip.
“A great example is, recently we had a pretty major case closed by arrest, and the tipster, we let them know — ‘Hey, thank you so much for this; this is going to be a big reward for you’ — and they said, ‘Well, I’m not really worried about the money. I really just want these people off the street.’ And that kind of hit me. That was a big deal to me.”
Ebarb said steps are taken to ensure the anonymity of tipsters. When tips are received and the information is forwarded to the police, any information that could possibly identify the tipster is taken out “to make sure that it doesn't go past us.”
“We take anonymity extremely seriously, this organization,” he said.
Is there ever a possibility that a tipster can accidentally be identified — for example, by an officer recognizing a tipster’s voice while investigating a crime? “Funny enough, our call center does not have recording capability, and we actually have it worked out with our phone provider, (and) they actually don’t allow the phone numbers to come through their transfer center to our call center. … We don’t record tips to ensure anonymity.”
Homicides appear to be on the increase locally. Many crimes, especially violent crimes, are heat-of-the-moment incidents that cannot be anticipated, but is there anything that law enforcement can do to mitigate that in any way? “We see in Shreveport a lot of shootings and homicides are the results of retaliation from a prior incident. So that’s where Crime Stoppers and the police department really come in to work together is, once an incident occurs — a shooting, a homicide — getting that information, getting that person in custody as quickly as possible to make sure there is not a retaliation,” said Ebarb.
And what can the public do in that same regard? Ebarb said, “One way we close a lot of our narcotics-related arrests is you see neighbors noticing neighbors have a lot of in-and-out traffic, a lot of suspicious activity, and they’ll put in a tip saying, ‘I think there’s narcotics activity at this house,’ and our narcotics unit follows up on that. And we’ve found that a lot of times if you suspect that it’s real … we’ve made some major narcotics-trafficking busts in Shreveport that way.”
Do tips come in quickly after a crime, or do people sometimes wait for the police to ask for the public’s help in identifying a suspect? Ebarb said that if a shooting or homicide happens, “we will receive tips on that within minutes and definitely within hours sometimes. It’s funny how quickly people will rush to Crime Stoppers to submit information.
“And on a related note, sometimes Crime Stoppers will be like a puzzle, and that was the case with a recent homicide. We had three different tips that all gave pieces of the puzzle solving that case.” All three tipsters were rewarded for their information.
With law enforcement besieged with negative press and calls to “defund the police,” has there been any negative reaction to Crime Stoppers in light of that? “Thankfully, there has not,” Ebarb said. “I’ve been very careful. I’ve watched for that, but it seems across the country Crimes Stoppers have been very insulated from that. I think a big part of that is our focus is strictly on solving crimes, and I think that’s something we can all get behind, no matter how you feel about the police or community government or where our money should be spent, I think we can all agree that solving crime is a high, high priority. And I don’t think anybody can argue with that.”
To submit a tip — anonymously — call Caddo-Shreveport Crime Stoppers at 673-7373.
THIS ARTICLE WAS PUBLISHED IN THE September 4 ISSUE OF FOCUS SB - THE INQUISITOR.