Crime Stoppers

Crime Stoppers or Crimestoppers is a program, separate from the emergency telephone number system or other standard methods of contacting police, that allows a member of the community to provide anonymous information about criminal activity. This allows a person to provide crime solving assistance to the authorities without being directly involved in the investigation process. Crime Stopper programs are operated in many communities worldwide.

The authorities, especially the police, sometimes rely on information from the public. Crime Stoppers was developed to combat the public's fear of reprisals, public apathy, and a reluctance to get involved. The program claims to provide anonymity (callers are given a code number instead of being asked for their name and calls are not traced or recorded) and to pay rewards when their information leads to an arrest and/or conviction. However, in a 2003 California death penalty case in which a defendant had called the tip line himself, taped conversations made by the managers of a tip hotline guaranteeing anonymity were used as evidence.