In 1976 police in Albuquerque, New Mexico had no leads and no information to help them catch the person responsible for a fatal gas station shooting.

A detective working the case partnered with local television stations and set up an anonymous telephone line where people could leave tips. Local businesses pooled money to fund a cash reward for anyone who called with information about the killer.

Within 72 hours a person called and identified the car leaving the scene at the time of the killing and the case was solved. This moment became the inspiration behind anonymous tipline Crime Stoppers International.

In 1981 the Birmingham branch, Crime Stoppers of Metro Alabama, opened their doors and has since provided information that led to nearly 8,000 solved cases.

Former Homewood Police Chief of nearly 40 years Bob Copus was selected as executive director of Crime Stoppers of Metro Alabama in 2017.

He said to make sure this year does not repeat Birmingham’s record-breaking year of homicides last year it will take selflessness and working together from local organizations and communities alike.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

When and how did Crime Stoppers first come to Birmingham?

What happened here is they [International Crime Stoppers] started advertising ‘Come to our Crime Stoppers’ conference and learn how you can use it.’ So, in 1981 the chief of Birmingham Police Department was Bill Myers and he sent Doug McBee to the conference, and he came back, and they set up Crime Stoppers of Birmingham.

Initially it was operated through the Birmingham Police Department and the call takers were Birmingham Police officers. That went on that way for many years and that’s probably what most people are most familiar with.

So then about 8 or 9 years ago we diversified, and we set up our home office and got our own information systems. We stopped using sworn police officers. For that very reason, the best way to keep you [callers] anonymous is by not knowing who you are. So, by having non-sworn individuals we don’t need to know who you are. We don’t want to know who you are. And we can keep you safer from being identified that way.

Since 1981 Crime Stoppers has never revealed the source of a tip. Because we don’t know. If you ask me right now who gave us a tip on whatever case, I’d tell you I don’t know.

Calls go through a service that comes to us, so we have no way to get an I.P. address or a phone number and we don’t have caller I.D. We’ve had a police agency near here come to us and say ‘We need to know who gave you that [tip].’ And we said ‘Well we don’t have it.’

If you text us, we don’t get the phone number. If you send it online, we can’t get your I.P. address. And we can’t ever just decide to change our mind and get that information.

How does the Crime Stoppers tip line work?

24 hours a day Crime Stoppers USA has an answering service. You never will get a busy signal. You’ll always talk to someone when you call Crime Stoppers. You won’t have to leave a message. We’ll have somebody live 24 hours a day and I think that’s really helpful. 7 days a week and holidays our crime answering service is open.

The service is out of state. But the good thing about it is if they have just a tip on crime you know ‘I think I know who did this’ they would put it into a structured form, and it’s emailed to everybody immediately.

Like right now if somebody called the crime center and they picked up and received a tip I would receive an email saying ‘You have a tip that needs to be checked.’

If it’s something super serious, if it’s a matter of life or death they will call. They have all of our numbers. They can call us 24 hours a day, at 3 a.m. and say ‘Listen you need to look at this tip right now. This person is talking about a crime that could be serious.’

When you receive one of these emails or calls what are the next steps from there?

All of our tips are formatted through a company called P3 and it’s all inside a software package. From that software we can look at the crime. We can look at dropdown boxes we update pretty routinely. They’ll say like who are the detectives in Fultondale. Who are the detectives in Helena. And it drops it down and we send it to all of them. If it’s of a serious enough nature, we will call them. We try just to email them, but we will actually call them and say ‘Listen you need to look at this tip right now.’

I saw that there’s also an app and a place to submit tips on the Crimstoppers’ website so how do you guys sort through those?

It’s seamless. They all sort of mash up together. Pull up our Facebook and you can submit a tip. Instagram you can submit a tip. And they’re all going into the same system. So, it’s really seamless and works really well.

It’s the same thing as if you call us these things all pull together and work well.

Do Birmingham Crime Stoppers take calls from all over the state or are there different branches for different cities/counties? How does that work?

You’re seeing this a little in the Birmingham market right now because of Crime Stoppers of Central Alabama. They have some cases that they want to get on the Birmingham television market so they will advertise or send a press release to our local television stations. And sometimes they [the stations] get a little confused between Crime Stoppers of Metro Alabama and Crime Stoppers of Central Alabama.

There’s also a Crime Stoppers program in Huntsville. There’s a Crime Stoppers program in Tuscaloosa. There’s a Crime Stoppers desk in Mobile. So, there’s about four or five [desks] here in Birmingham. There’s probably hundreds across the United States.

We cover Jefferson, Shelby, Walker, St. Clair, Blount, Bibb, and Cullman counties and Chilton County some.

The marketing is different. The marketing you’re going to use in downtown Birmingham is different from the marketing you’re going to use in Cullman. They don’t have as much what you would call urban street crime, but they do have crime.

And in all of these locations, does the funding for your cash rewards primarily come from local businesses?

That’s correct. For the most part, yes, our reward money is donated money. We do get some support from government entities too. For instance, we’re in this building, the 2121 building, with government support.

But the idea behind it is we want business and individuals to donate to Crime Stoppers. If they want to donate, we have a donate button on our website and all of our social media. You can donate anything from $5 to $500 or whatever you want on our donation page.

With that I wanted to say we just wrapped up 2022 with 5,510 tip calls taken. 337 cases were cleared because of Crime Stoppers helping law enforcement find the suspect. Whether they were able to persecute or not, they know who did it.

We paid out 120 rewards for a total of $110,000 in 2022. Since 1981 we’ve [Crime Stoppers of Metro Alabama] paid out over a million dollars for 4,563 tips and cleared nearly 8,000 cases.

Crime Stoppers works. It worked in 1981 and it’s still working now. As long as it does work, we need to keep doing it.

There’s a lot of family members that have the two questions: who? and why? Who took my loved one’s life? And why did they do it? Oftentimes they don’t know. They just know a young man was found slumped over in a car shot. A grandmother is washing dishes and a bullet comes through the window and hits her. A child is playing out in the street and two people are shooting at each other on the other end of the street. The bullet hits the child. These people want to know why, and they want to know who.

Crime Stoppers is here to try to answer those questions. We’re not an investigative agency. We’re not the police. We are an information portal. Information we receive, we send to law enforcement and law enforcement takes that information and does with it what they can.

The two biggest questions we get are ‘Aren’t you really the police? You say you’re keeping this anonymous but you’re really the police, aren’t you?’ and ‘You say you pay out, but do you really pay out?’ So, I gave you those numbers because it’s no and yes.

No, we are not the police. We don’t ever intend to identify our tipsters and yes, we do pay out. You can get paid up to $5000. So, it depends on the severity of the case and the quality of the information. How much the tip helps law enforcement. We usually run off the recommendation from the investigator they’ll say you know ‘This tip was really helpful.’ And they use it to persecute a homicide. We’re going to pay really well on that. If you call and turn in somebody that’s got a warrant on them, we’ll probably pay a little less depending on what the warrant is. But we still will pay money.

If you’re tip is good, if it helps law enforcement do what they do best, if it helps them solve cases and helps them locate criminals, we will pay.

What would you say is the biggest challenge Crime Stoppers faces?

We want to be able to help law enforcement in a way that helps them solve a crime. Investigators and chiefs change often. So, you have a great relationship with the police department, and you come back two years later and there’s no one there you even know. So, you have to constantly reach out to law enforcement and make sure they understand what we can do for them.

The best way to stop crime is to identify and try to remedy some of the conditions that are creating that crime. You can arrest people for a long, long time and they’re going to stop doing that crime when you arrest them but that doesn’t stop other people. So we definitely look at that side too.

As someone that has experience in law enforcement and has continued to work with them closely over the years, do you have any insight as to why Birmingham saw a record-breaking year of homicides in 2022?

Yeah, that’s one of the things that I think Crime Stoppers is trying to send out. The violent crime that we’re seeing across Birmingham and across our whole area is younger people settling differences in the heat of their anger. Oftentimes they pick up a gun. And that’s something that’s very difficult for a police officer riding by in his car to stop. Unless he just happened to see it.

So, the communities themselves have got to take some ownership and cool down this violence. When you know that you have a violent person in your neighborhood you need to call and let’s get them brought into where they need to be.

If you’ve got information that could keep a homicide from occurring, call Crime Stoppers. Let us know and we’ll get that to the police.

We’ve changed our marketing a lot. On our billboards we’ve got ‘Who matters most to you?’ And it’s a picture of people from all different races and all different backgrounds. The idea is that everybody has to matter to you. When you call and say your mother, your loved one, your son, your brother has been murdered and you’d like to Crime Stoppers to get that case out there. Well, it matters a whole lot to you right then and there.

Some of this is probably gang related and people will tell me ‘Well as long as they’re shooting each other I don’t care.’ But that’s not good enough. Because if two or three violent people pull into a gas station parking lot, which has happened several times here in Birmingham, and they start shooting at each other what if they hit somebody else in the parking lot? Someone who was just filling up on gas or going to buy a soft drink or a cup of coffee and now they’re dead. They [the shooters] don’t care.

That insensitivity, ‘I don’t care about anyone but me.’ We’ve got to do something about that, and it really starts with young people. So, Crime Stoppers is trying to get young people to see Crime Stoppers as a resource and as someone they can trust. So, if they know something they can say something to Crime Stoppers. And we’ll try to get that through to law enforcement and get something done about it.

I think that we have seen, knock on wood, a cooling down somewhat. Birmingham has put some things in place. Their Real Time Crime Center is up and running and they’re trying to find information to stop violent events before they occur.

But ultimately the community knows more about what goes on in their neighborhood than anyone else. So that’s who we’re trying to reach out to and say, ‘Listen if you know something bad is going to happen or you know something bad just happened call Crime Stoppers.’

We’re not going to tell anybody who you are. We’re not going to try and identify you. But let’s get this information out and stop this circle of violence we’re seeing.

I don’t think anybody has the formula to completely stop violent crime but if we all work together there’s a lot better chance, we’re going to do this. That’s everything from the news media, to law enforcement, to community leaders and organizations.

We can’t just say ‘Well that’s just the way it is.’ I don’t believe we can do that. We’ve got to do better than that.

To leave an anonymous tip or volunteer with Crime Stoppers of Metro Alabama visit their website at https://crimestoppersmetroal.org/ or call 205-254-7777.