With Mike Ford’s law enforcement career nearing an end, the Iola Police Department soon will have another coordinator for the Allen County Crime Stoppers program.
Officer Danny Rodriguez will take over as the department’s liaison for the Crime Stoppers program, which assists in helping resolve unsolved crimes in the area.
“I’ll be retiring soon, and we thought it’d be good to get Danny in here and get him trained on it,” Ford said. “This will be a transition for the next year.”
“I’m excited,” Rodriguez said. “In the 13 years I’ve been here, I’ve seen a lot of tips come in.”
Ford estimated Crime Stoppers receives between five and 10 tips a month, with a board of directors meeting monthly to discuss whether any such tips are worthy of a cash reward.
Crime Stoppers can hand out rewards of up to $2,000.
Most tips come in through the program’s online tips program, “which is good and bad,” Ford joked. “We still get tips for Allen County, Indiana, and Allen County, Ohio. We just pass those tips along to the other agencies.”
While the cash reward is a nice incentive, “quite honestly, most people don’t want any money,” Ford said. ‘Most of them just want a crime solved and for something to be done about it.”
The key element for Crime Stoppers is the assured anonymity of the tipster.
“We’ll get people who come and want to talk to us, but we tell them to do it through the service,” Ford said. “If we know who they are, the Crime Stoppers bylaws say we can’t give them any money.”
Therein lies a problem. The software subscription costs have skyrocketed in recent years, to the point Crime Stoppers must pay about $100 a month to subscribe for the online tips database software. Likewise, Crime Stoppers also spends about $100 a month for its digital kiosks in the lobby at Iola City Hall and near the exit at Iola Walmart, which display information about unsolved crimes.
“That’s a lot of money for us,” Ford said. “These prices keep going up. And right now, our organization only has about $1,500 in the bank account. So if we get a tip worthy of $2,000, we’d have to do some fundraisers for it.”
Crime Stoppers is a certified non-profit organization, which means any donations are tax-deductible.
“We were hurt by the pandemic, because we couldn’t do any fundraisers for two years,” Ford explained.
The next fundraiser is a chicken dinner at the Iola Elks Lodge, 202 S. Jefferson Ave., starting at 5:30 p.m. Friday. The dinners, complete with chicken, a vegetable and drink, sell for $10 a plate.
“We try to do a dinner about every six months to stay afloat,” Ford said.
