In the month since the Jamaica Constabulary Force re-branded its information hotline Crime Stop with the new, easy-to-remember 3-digit number 311, the unit said it recorded the highest number of calls received from the start of the year and, most recently, a major success in the capture of alleged murderer Joseph Francis, who had been in hiding for two years.

“We went to an all-time low in June, where we only received 19 calls, and in July we only took 29 calls,” Crime Stop Co-ordinator Prudence Gentles told the Sunday Observer.

On July 31, the re-branded information line was launched, and right away the calls started coming in.

“It’s a much easier number to remember, and the people are responding,” she added.

For the month of August, said Gentles, 68 calls came in, bringing the number of useful calls received by Crime Stop to 361 since the start of the year. About one in six of those ‘useful’ calls ends in an arrest, explained Gentles, adding that since the start of this year, 25 persons had been arrested from police acting on Crime Stop tips.

Crime Stop, which began in 1989, is one of the longest-running police programmes, and offers financial rewards to persons who call and anonymously give information about crimes. The amounts paid out as rewards range from as low as $2,000 for information leading to the recovery of stolen motor vehicles, up to $100,000 for information leading to the resolution of the Crime of the Month.

The Crime of the Month is usually a crime that has remained unsolved and outstanding for more than six months, and is the one highlighted in the programme’s media advertisements and public announcements for the entire month.

“Usually we find that it’s the families of victims that call and ask if we can highlight their case as the Crime of the Month, because that gets the case attention, especially if they feel as if it’s being neglected,” said Gentles.

That’s the route the children of Paulette Reid-Nelson took after her death, going to the extent of raising the $100,000 to offer as a reward for information leading to the arrest of their mother’s killer. She was brutally slain in June 2004, but it was not until this month that the man accused of killing her was apprehended.

“We got a call from someone asking if the reward for that case was still being offered, the killer had not yet been apprehended, so we took the information,” said one of the Crime Stop counsellors.

Days later, a police operation followed up on the tip, and nabbed Francis, who had been living in the deep woodlands of north St Catherine for the two years since his common-law wife’s murder.

On a daily basis, the phones at Crime Stop ring incessantly, with the majority of calls being prank or joke calls. According to the counsellors who take Crime Stop calls, pranksters, the number of whom increases exponentially after 2:00 pm when schools are dismissed, present a real problem to the unit in that they waste valuable time and may cause real, legitimate calls to not get through.

“They call and say the worst things you can think of, bad words, insults, it’s really tiring,” said a Crime Stop counsellor who, because of the sensitive nature of his job, cannot be identified.

But even with the high volume of prank calls, Crime Stop works, said Gentles, and the proof is in the fact that information keeps coming in.

“There is absolutely no reason why we would need anyone’s name, we just need the information they can give us. And if you think about it, we’ve been doing this since 1989, and never had one person compromised, which means that obviously, we have a very good track record. If even one person were compromised, then the whole programme would have gone down the drain a long time ago, because bad news travels fast.”

Even when rewards are being paid out, said Gentles, the police do not try to find out anyone’s identity.

“We pay cash, and we pay it whichever way the person we are paying wants it paid. We can drop it off at a location requested by the person we’re dropping it to, some people feel comfortable enough to come to the office, some ask that the money be sent by Western Union or to a bank account… many different ways, but all done in cash,” she said.

campbello@jamaicaobserver.com