Middlesex County Acting Prosecutor Andrew C. Carey. Middlesex County Crime Stoppers, part of an international tip-collection program, has proven effective in helping law enforcement solve crimes.
“In law enforcement, we need the community,” said Middlesex County Acting Prosecutor Andrew C. Carey. “We can use their eyes and ears, and what they have seen and heard, to lead to the appropriate person being arrested and the right result in seeking justice. We rely on the community to help us do our jobs.”
Since its inception in May 2011, Middlesex County Crime Stoppers has received approximately 335 tips, 10 of which have led to arrests.
“Those are arrests that are directly related to the tip,” Carey said. “In a lot of other cases, the tipster might point us in the right direction.”
Those who provide valid tips that lead to an arrest are entitled to cash rewards, and $600 has been paid out in rewards since the inception of the program, according to Christopher Penna, acting captain with the prosecutor’s office.
“The Middlesex County Crime Stoppers board of directors sets the award on a caseby case basis,” Penna said. “What typically happens is that we would receive the tips as law enforcement, and we would then communicate to the board that the tip led to an arrest. We give the board the facts of the case and then the board will vote on a reward.”
Tipsters may call, text or email what they know, while remaining anonymous. Penna said texts and email sources are encrypted so that their origin cannot be determined.
“A lot of times, they just don’t know what information to give to law enforcement,” Penna said. “We will try to communicate back to the tipsters … and get a dialogue going with the tipster so we can obtain more information that way.”
According to Penna, the anonymity is maintained throughout the entire process. If a tipster chooses to collect the reward money, it is transferred through the treasurer of the group’s civilian board of directors to a specific bank at a designated date and time. Carey noted that some who give tips decline the reward.
“There is no law enforcement contact at all with the actual tipster,” Penna said.
New Brunswick Police Director Anthony Caputo, who serves as president of Crime Stoppers of Middlesex County, said the majority of the reward money is raised through fundraising events and donations from local businesses. Public funds cannot be used for the rewards.
In some cases, friends of the victim may raise funds to create a larger reward for information, Carey said. Last year, students from the New Brunswick High School class of 1958 raised $10,000 as a reward for information leading to an arrest in the stabbing death of retired schoolteacher Gail Hariton in North Brunswick in 2000. The homicide remains unsolved. Caputo said anonymity for tipsters is the key to the program’s success.
“The success of this program is going to be based on trust,” Caputo said. “If we ever blow somebody’s identity, the program is useless. So, these steps that are put in place are there to protect the success of the program and to protect the person giving the tip.”
Crime Stoppers is an international program that began in New Mexico in the 1970s. An officer with the Albuquerque Police Department created the tip line as a way to obtain information anonymously after the murder of a college student. The organization now has branches across the United States and an international branch that advocates for the organization across the globe.
Middlesex County Crime Stoppers offers rewards for information in a wide variety of crimes of varying degrees of severity.
The police departments in both East Brunswick and South Brunswick teamed up with Crime Stoppers last month to offer a reward for information regarding a series of residential burglaries.
“Even if it’s something as minor as kids doing vandalism, if it’s a chronic problem, police may ask for Crime Stoppers to put something out,” Caputo said.
“The officer [in New Mexico] thought there were two reasons that someone didn’t go to the police: one was apathy and the other was the fear of retaliation,” Penna said. “He eliminated the issue of apathy by offering a reward, so now there was something to gain by the public, and he eliminated the fear of retaliation by giving complete anonymity to callers.”
Caputo said Crime Stoppers is a good resource for law enforcement personnel who previously felt limited in reaching out to the public.
“There’s always been a little bit of frustration in law enforcement whenever there is a crime and you want to post a reward, because we don’t have the ability to do that as part of law enforcement,” Caputo said. “In the years that I’ve been a cop, victims ask if we can post rewards, and you sit there and say there’s nothing you can do, because you just can’t. This civilian-run organization is able to help victims by posting those rewards.”
Members of the Middlesex County Crime Stoppers board of directors are Ben Cannizzaro, general manager and publisher of Greater Media Newspapers; Kevin Donovan, director of global security, Johnson & Johnson; Kyle Flood, head coach of the Rutgers University football program; Adrian Hughes, general manager of the Hyatt Regency Hotel New Brunswick; Stephen Jones, president and CEO of Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital; Jay Kohl, vice president of administration and public safety at Rutgers University; and H. James Polos, Middlesex County freeholder. Rickey Varga, president of the Middlesex County Chiefs of Police Association, serves as the law enforcement liaison and is a nonvoting board member.
For more information about the program or to submit a tip, visit www.middlesextips.com.