Huntsville Area Crime Stoppers is helping to find criminals all over Madison County, and it helped to solve nearly 80 cases just last month.
Crime Stoppers encourages the community to help local law enforcement fight crime. It’s been around for 35 years, and police say it still works great today. Just last month, 77 cases were solved, 13 felons were arrested, and over $30,000 of stolen property and drugs were recovered.
Every week, police post a list of the “Valley’s Most Wanted” online and then ask for the community’s help.
Huntsville Area Crime Stoppers Coordinator Nathan Nickelson said, “When I say actionable tips, that means tips that’ll come through the land line or through the platform that police can act upon, and we will get anywhere from ten to seventeen of those a day where we’ll dispatch out and let the officers check out something that the general public has reported to us.”
They make it easy to submit an anonymous a tip. You can call 53-crime, fill out a tip form online, or even use the P3 Tips app. The P3 program allows officers to interact with tipsters in real time.
“A lot of our tipsters may be sitting in the same room with the offender, and now with the advent of the social media platforms that we operate off of, we literally get tips in real time telling us exactly where this person is, and without that knowledge, there’s no way the police would know that, and without that information being passed to us through those platforms, that guy is still out on the streets,” said Nickelson.
Tipsters can also be rewarded up to $1,000 for submitting tips.
Nickelson said, “When we say we can pay up to $1,000, the $1,000 is usually a very violent crime, a homicide, rape, sexual abuse, something like that.”
The Crime Stoppers program is funded completely by donations. You can donate on the Crime Stoppers website.
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