Crime Stoppers of Oregon is shutting down at the end of this month after more than four decades of operation.
Since its launch in 1983, the organization says it has received tens of thousands of anonymous tips from the public that have helped law enforcement solve hundreds of crimes, from bank robberies to cold case homicides.
Chairman Henry Groepper is a retired Portland police officer who has been with Crime Stoppers of Oregon since its start. He served as its first coordinator and narrated public service announcements that aired on radio stations across the state, offering cash rewards as high as $2,500 for information about unsolved felonies.
But Groepper says in recent years, there has been a decline in the number of cash rewards the board has given out, with none so far this year. He says another factor in the board’s decision to end Crime Stoppers of Oregon was a data breach in March of a third-party company’s platform that Crime Stoppers programs, law enforcement and schools use to access confidential tips.
Groepper joins us to share more details about the decision to end Crime Stoppers of Oregon and his decades of service to it.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Crime Stoppers of Oregon has operated for more than 40 years. The nonprofit says it’s received tens of thousands of anonymous tips from the public in that time – tips that have been helping law enforcement solve hundreds of cases ranging from bank robberies to homicides. But the nonprofit is shutting down at the end of this month.
Henry Groepper is a retired Portland police officer who’s been with Crime Stoppers of Oregon since its start. He served as its first coordinator. He was the voice of public service announcements on radio stations across the state, and he currently serves as the chairman of the nonprofit’s board. Henry Groepper, welcome to Think Out Loud.
Henry Groepper: Well, thank you.
Miller: Can you explain the basics of how Crime Stoppers works?
Groepper: Very simple. People can leave information anonymously. They’re issued a special code number, and only they have that number. And if the tip leads to an arrest, they’re paid up to $1,000 for that tip and they just walk away. No one knows who they are. We’ve never met…
Miller: Even on the back end, your back end? So, there’s no information that you have at Crime Stoppers, in terms of the tipsters?
Groepper: No, they’re just simply a number. The program started out real simple. We had a phone and a notepad. And you’d answer it, “Crime Stoppers, Officer Henry Groepper.” And they’d tell me what the tip was that they were submitting. I’d give them a tip number, tell them to call back in a couple of weeks, and if it led to an arrest, they would qualify for a reward.
Miller: Now it’s all online. But for decades when it started, when you were there, as you’re saying, you’d answer the phone. What’s an example of what someone would say?
Groepper: Technology changed pretty fast after the phone. The issue with the phone, it was not recorded, it did not have caller ID. That was one of the concerns. We never met the individual. That’s what I really appreciate about that program. Because the two things about Crime Stoppers that it covers … People worry, “If I submit a tip, they find out who I am, there’s retaliation.” And then there are people, “Why should I get involved? What’s in it for me?” A lot of people may not be interested in the money. Some people are.
Miller: And Crime Stoppers solved both of those by providing anonymity and providing the reward for people who would only provide information to you and to pass on to the police if they got that reward. I’m curious about the passing it on to police. Now, as I mentioned, you are a retired Portland police officer. What kind of relationship has Crime Stoppers had with Portland police or other law enforcement agencies across the state?
Groepper: It started out really well and it just grew. Technology changed. We went from the issue of having just a phone to a tip line. For a while, we had an answering service in Canada and it was anonymous. If you wanted to go after public records, you’d have to go up into Canada to get them. But what happened is that it became so expensive. During a period here where they had a lot of demonstrations, they’d call the line and yell obscenities into it. The people would take the note in…
Miller: Oh, those were sort of anti-law enforcement messages, right?
Groepper: Oh yes. In fact, one of the messages we got that came down – because they’d send us text messages or typed messages down – was that we were messing with them here, the protesters, and they were going to mess with us. And they did. That one month we had a phone bill of over $700. We talked to the answering service. They said, “oh, we won’t charge you for those kinds of calls.” They did. The next month, it was over $900.
So we did away with the answering service. Because at that time, there was a program called TipSoft where they could leave messages. So we went to that. Then that evolved into a program called P3, which is a crime tip program. You can load it onto your cell phone, tablet. You could even do it on a computer.
Miller: And that’s what people have been using most recently. It’s all web-based, and then there are a whole bunch of questions. Tell us what crime you’re reporting, what you know about the person, the perpetrator, all kinds of information. Then you can access that and pass it on to police officers?
Groepper: The way that works is really simple. They log on to the app, give the tip. The tip goes to a company called Navigate360. They’re back east. The identity, or the cell phone number or email address, is encrypted. So we don’t know it. We get the tip back with just the tip number and the tip itself.
Miller: In general, how high quality would you say the actual tips are? I mean, you were talking earlier about people who used this phone number as a way to complain about law enforcement actions. That’s a separate category. But for the people who are actually saying, hey, I’d like to share information, in good faith, about something that I know about, how good quality has that information been?
Groepper: Most of it’s been really good quality. Some of it is, “well, we have a neighbor who has this dog that runs loose.” That’s not really a crime that you get involved in, but a lot of times they are good tips. The nice thing about technology is those tips come in now, and let’s say it’s one for Salem, Eugene or down in Roseburg, that tip can be forwarded immediately down there. I had cases where the tipster was so accurate, they knew of a wanted individual and they were in California. But the tipster didn’t have the address, but he described the location: Under the water tower, there’s a blue house and just to the left of that. And that’s where the individual was.
Miller: As a police officer yourself or now a former one, when you would hear specifics with that level of specificity, would you wonder how it was that the tipster had this information?
Groepper: We don’t question that, as long as they weren’t part of it.
Miller: That’s a big “as long as.” I guess I’m wondering if sometimes you thought this tipster must have been a part of this crime?
Groepper: Sometimes you felt they were close to it, they knew something about it or knew something, and they got that information from someone else. But they knew enough about that crime that you knew the tip was good.
Miller: In general, was that really high-quality information? Was that about cases that you had asked for information about, or did this come in unsolicited?
Groepper: Both ways. Years ago, we used to actually call it a profile of the week, a crime. And we also started doing cold cases on a weekly basis. We’d record up a crime stopper of the week plus a cold case. The tips would come in. But there were always those who would send information about something else.
Miller: That is one of the reasons that folks listening to you now may recognize your voice. You have a very recognizable voice. For years, you were the one who would record these PSAs.
Groepper: Since about 1983 till around 2004.
Miller: But I remember hearing you well after 2004. Am I wrong? I mean, haven’t you been on more recently?
Groepper: Yeah, you’re right. Probably in 2024.
Miller: OK, 2024.
Groepper: I retired in 2005. The Portland Police Bureau, we’re not law enforcement. We get no government funding or anything like that. So when you contact Crime Stoppers, you’re not calling or talking to the police.
Miller: And that is intentional? That’s the point, to keep that wall there?
Groepper: That’s right.
Miller: For folks who haven’t heard what your PSAs are like, I wanna play part of one of the radio spots that you did. This is from 2015:
Announcer [PSA recording]: Crime Stoppers, a public service of Oregon and Southwest Washington law enforcement.
Groepper [PSA recording]: This is Officer Henry Groepper. On Friday, June 19, 2015, at approximately 7:50 in the evening, a subject known only as Papa John, assaulted a woman inside her apartment in the 2400 block of Southeast 139th Avenue in Portland. The suspect, Papa John, is described as a white male in his sixties, 5′2, 120 pounds, wearing wire framed glasses, and may have spent time in prison. Crime Stoppers is offering a cash reward of up to $1,000 for information reported to Crime Stoppers that leads to an arrest in this case or any unsolved felony crime. And tipsters can remain anonymous.
Miller: I understand that that ad was one of the ones that was successful. That case was solved in part or largely because of a tip that came in?
Groepper: Right. A lot of those cases we got like that got solved. We’ve been told we’d have never solved it without Crime Stoppers. There’s an old expression, two people could keep a secret if one of them is dead. But if you’ve got that other person who’s still alive, that’s the one to call Crime Stoppers.
Miller: How do you all, as an organization, decide how big a cash reward to give out?
Groepper: They have a matrix system. For example, like graffiti, it’ll start at $100, but it increases if that crime of graffiti increases. Homicides are always right at $2,500. And they can actually go higher than that. The IRS has given us a special little caveat. Since we don’t know the tipsters, we don’t have to fill out a 1099 and the money’s tax-free.
Miller: One more incentive for people to do the right thing. Was there a heyday for Crime Stoppers tips coming in?
Groepper: It was during the period where the TV stations, radio stations, had public service times that they donated. When that was eliminated, we can’t afford to buy airtime.
Miller: So you saw a real correlation between the ads on the airwaves and the calls coming in. And when you didn’t get those spots for free, you couldn’t run as many and you didn’t get as many tips?
Groepper: We got a notice from one of the stations on that free airtime, [where] they documented how much they gave us. There was one during the Super Bowl, one of our spots ran. It was like $1,300 back then. That spot today is probably worth millions of dollars.
Miller: And you got it for free? Wow.
To go back to the one that we just played, the one where the suspect was known as Papa John … I should note that we actually made a couple edits to that audio file. It aired on the radio, and in the original one that aired, there were some relatively gruesome details about the violence. How do you decide, how would you decide over the years, how much detail to include?
Groepper: That is up to the investigator. The investigator is the one who submits the crime to Crime Stoppers, then we would take it and make it into a 60-second radio spot, and then also release it to TV stations. And for a while, The Oregonian even did the cases. One of the funny ones was, a guy walked into Central Precinct to the desk officer, had the clip out of The Oregonian, a picture of himself, and said, “I’m wanted on Crime Stoppers.” The desk officer said, “Yeah, that looks like you. Have a seat. I’ll call the detectives.”
Miller: Wow. Did he think he would get a reward for turning himself in?
Groepper: Well, I had a call from the jail. There was a gentleman who said, “I’m on Crime Stoppers this week and I’m here in the Multnomah County Jail. If I turn myself in, do I get a reward?”
Miller: I hope the answer is no?
Groepper: The answer was no.
Miller: Maybe a pat on the back as you get led into lockup. Are there other cases that really stand out to you right now?
Groepper: There’s a cold case that I remember. It was a young lady named Jenny Lewis. Jenny Lewis was going to school. She’d get up in the morning, get dressed, and her parents thought she was going to school. What she was doing was going over to the Park Blocks and hanging out with a bunch of gals, and there was some prostitution. Jenny Lewis’ body was found in a motel over on East Burnside. This was in ’73. I remember the date. The people in the Park Blocks said she’d gotten into a pickup with Washington plates, and that’s all we had.
This was just a while back. I was a guest speaker. So they wanted to know about Crime Stoppers and Cold Case. I talked about Crime Stoppers and then I profiled, to the 150 or 200 people, the case of Jenny Lewis and how she was killed. After I got done, I was putting the displays away. An elderly gentleman came up to me and said, “Officer Groepper, Jenny Lewis was my daughter.” You talk about a gut punch. And he said, “My wife died not knowing who killed our daughter.” He said, “It still hurts after all these years.”
Miller: Did you ever find out who killed her?
Groepper: No. It got to the point where they thought they had a suspect, but the suspect died. We’ve never had anyone come forward and say, “yes, I know it was them.”
Miller: It says something pretty profound that my question to you was, is there a case that stands out to you? And my guess is that you could have chosen, in response, some other successful cases. Cases where tips that came in led to an answer for families, an answer for law enforcement, an answer for society, a successful prosecution. But your response to my question was a case where you never got that answer.
Groepper: To me, that showed when a family has a loved one or a victim of crime and it goes unsolved … For that elderly gentleman, it will never go away. He’ll take that to his grave. I know he will.
Miller: Why is Crime Stoppers of Oregon shutting down at the end of this month?
Groepper: It’s kind of like we’ve gotten old, the airtime issue. We used to get billboards for $125, just for the printing cost. And the billboard was up as long as it wasn’t rented by somebody. But billboards now are all electronic. In the last five years we’ve only made five payouts.
Miller: Meaning in five years, only five crimes have been solved through tips that came in?
Groepper: There was probably a case where a suspect committed more than one crime, so that would clear up maybe three cases. But we only had five payouts. And in the “heyday,” I call it, we’d have that in a month.
Miller: What does it mean to you that Crime Stoppers, a nonprofit that you’ve devoted a big chunk of your life to in various ways, [is] about to go away? What does it mean to you?
Groepper: Well, initially, there were 10 members on the board, so it wasn’t my decision. But for about the last five or six years, they’ve been wondering why we aren’t getting tips. Why aren’t we making payments? When you’re a volunteer board, the only reward you get is the satisfaction that you’ve done a good job. So they decided that was it.
The final straw came though [was] Navigate360, in March, notified us that they’d had a data breach.
Miller: That’s the company that has the app that does the back end of the tip?
Groepper: They have approximately 400 Crime Stopper programs total in Canada and the United States. So we’re waiting to see what effect that would have had. But we basically are shutting down.
Miller: Henry Groepper, thanks very much for coming in. It was a pleasure talking with you.
Groepper: Thank you.
Miller: Henry Groepper is the chairman of the board of the nonprofit Crime Stoppers of Oregon.
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