TIPS FOR CRIME STOPPERS

It's been more than 25 years since a group of concerned citizens in
Albuquerque, New Mexico launched the world's first Crime Stoppers program
to help police solve local crimes. Today, Crime Stoppers International
boasts more than 1,100 programs worldwide, including the one in Ottawa.

Crime Stoppers publishes or broadcasts details of a crime and offers cash
rewards for tips that lead to solving it. These collaborative efforts of
the community, the media and the police have helped solve more than 866,000
cases since 1976 and recovered $8 billion of property and narcotics.

That's an impressive record by any measure, but now it's at risk because of
the ill-advised actions of Waterloo regional police, who thought they could
feed false information to their local program in 1998 to bolster a police
informant's credibility with other criminals.

That deception finally was revealed last week during an extortion trial in
Kitchener.

The ruse may have helped the informant's credibility, but it's had the
opposite effect on Crime Stoppers. Media in the Kitchener-Waterloo area
have refused to run further Crime Stoppers reports until they are sure they
won't be duped by the police.

But the repercussions of the Waterloo deception reach far beyond southern
Ontario.

Crime Stoppers has been successful in large part because the public trusted
it to portray accurately unresolved crimes and to handle with discretion
any tips those reports elicit. Such trust can take years to establish, but
can be destroyed in an instant, as the Waterloo program and others across
Canada have found to their dismay.

In January, a Crime Stoppers ad in Victoria, B.C. incorrectly identified a
woman as a suspect caught cashing cheques stolen from an 84-year-old
woman's mailbox. The only problem was that the clock on the bank
surveillance camera was 12 minutes off that day, leading the bank to give
police the wrong photo of the fraud suspect.

As devastating as this was for the woman who was wrongfully accused, it was
an honest mistake that could be corrected with a better VCR clock.

The vice-president of the Ontario Association of Crime Stoppers, Fred
Hicks, admits the Waterloo deception has been "devastating" to the
association's work. Other Crime Stoppers programs are having to move
quickly to maintain confidence in their activities.

Even here in Ottawa, where there is no evidence that police have ever
planted false information in a Crime Stoppers report, Police Chief Vince
Bevan felt it necessary to issue written instructions to all his officers
this week ordering them not to spread disinformation through Crime
Stoppers. He also assured local Crime Stoppers officials that his force has
not lied and will not lie to the program.

Such an assurance of honesty was the right thing to do in the wake of the
Waterloo revelations, but it should never have been necessary. Even with
Chief Bevan's actions and those of other police chiefs across Ontario, it
will take some time to fully restore public and media confidence in Crime
Stoppers reports.

That's a shame, because the program has demonstrated how successful it can
be in helping to build better communities through its collaborative efforts
to tackle unresolved crimes.

For now, however, Crime Stoppers finds itself on probation. With good
behaviour, it will overcome its current troubles, but any more misdeeds
could find it condemned in the court of public opinion.