The quickest route to Crime Stoppers cash? It’s not solving a murder

Most people only think about the Greater Kansas City Crime Stoppers TIPS Hotline when dramatic murders promise high cash rewards.

But that’s not the quickest way to Crime Stoppers cash. Most successful callers are turning in common fugitives with outstanding warrants living next door, or shacking up in their basements, or even sharing their beds.

Drug houses, guarding their turf, call in other drug houses.

As the hotline turns 35 years old this year, data gathered by the Kansas City Metropolitan Crime Commission revealed its most popular uses.

No less than 65 percent of all the hotline tips that earn cash rewards are callers busting common fugitives, said Kansas City Police Detective Kevin Boehm. And drug houses prompt the most calls — 50 percent of them.

“The people who are our tipsters are probably the same people who are being arrested,” Boehm said.

Crimes Stoppers once had an ad campaign with billboards saying: “Is your boyfriend a lying, cheating thief? (It’s payback time.)”

“We capitalize on it, actively,” he said.

These presumptions, of course, are only surmised, Boehm says. Because no one who takes the phone calls or allocates the cash awards has ever known anything more about their callers than their voice and the code number call takers assigned them.

“We don’t know and we don’t care who gives us the information,” Boehm said, “as long as we get it.”

The Crime Stoppers’ board ultimately decides how much is paid to a tipster, and a third party through a financial institution distributes it, only to someone with the corresponding code.

The hotline is controlled by the Kansas City Metropolitan Crime Commission and is a private, nonprofit entity to keep it separate from public police records that could be surfaced in a Sunshine Law request or subpoenaed in court.

The anonymity of the operation is paramount because it opens the door to receive tips from the people out there who know the bad guys and live among circles where there is an intense “no snitch” mentality, Boehm said.

The fugitive bust, with a simple arrest on the other end, will likely bring a $200 reward — “not a bad return on a 30-second phone call,” he said.

But maybe the fugitive bolts, is hard to catch, has multiple warrants, or has stolen guns or drugs. “Now you’re looking at maybe $700. A real bonus.”

The Crime Stoppers program was established in 1982. Since then, its records show, it has helped clear 627 homicides. The program has issued 141,404 code numbers for cash rewards and paid out more than $1.3 million. Law enforcement, from those tips, have also recovered more than $23 million in narcotics and property.

Ordinarily, the payout ranges between $200 and a ceiling of $2,000. But sometimes businesses or families of victims will pool cash together and give it to Crime Stoppers to offer higher rewards in a specific unsolved crime.

That’s how the tip line could offer a reward of $50,000 for the information that led to an arrest in the murder of Ali Kemp in 2002.

That case generated more than 3,000 calls, which, along with the more than 3,000 who called in on the 2007 murder of Kelsey Smith, have drawn the heaviest attention in the line’s history.

The Baby Lisa case of 2011, still unsolved, so far has generated more than 2,000 calls. The Waldo rapist attacks of 2010 also filled the call logs, Boehm said.

In January, the program added an app — available through its website at www.kccrimestoppers.com — that tipsters can use to provide information including photos and videos.

But when you’re turning in the nearest fugitive, you can still always call 816-474-TIPS (8477).

This story was originally published February 10, 2017 at 7:00 AM with the headline "The quickest route to Crime Stoppers cash? It’s not solving a murder."