The Canadian Crime Stoppers Association (CCSA) is advising its local chapters to solely accept tips by telephone instead of online, it said in a statement to CBC News on Friday.
The “interim telephone-only approach … will allow participating local programs to receive tips without using Navigate360’s P3 platform,” reads the statement, referring to the third-party U.S. company’s tip management platform that suffered a massive data breach in March.
It appears to be a shift for the not-for-profit organization, which had previously issued guidance to local programs that if members of the public asked about the breach, they should express their confidence in Navigate360’s security improvements and say the platform “remains secure and appropriate for continued use.”
In the Friday statement, the CCSA asked that the public now call 222-TIPS to submit tips anonymously. For programs that have been paused, there will be local announcements about when telephone reporting will resume, it said.
“Local programs will keep new information under their control and share it securely with law enforcement,” reads the statement from CCSA president David J. Forster.
“This change cannot undo the exposure of information already taken. We will continue pressing Navigate360 for answers while working to rebuild trust in a program that has long helped communities prevent and solve crime.”
The extent of the breach was revealed in a CBC investigation published last week, which found that over 1.5 million tips submitted to Canadian Crime Stoppers programs over the last 25 years had been hacked.
To date, more than 40 local Crime Stoppers chapters and police agencies in five provinces have temporarily paused their intake of anonymous tips or their partnerships with the organization. Meanwhile, the privacy commissioner is investigating the breach, focusing on Navigate360 and its security safeguards at the time of the hack in March.
“It’s hard to imagine [Crime Stoppers] ever getting back to where they were in terms of trust,” said Randy Lippert, a criminology professor at the University of Windsor in Ontario, in an interview with CBC News before the Friday statement was released.
At least 13 programs not accepting tips in any form
Before receiving the CCSA statement, CBC had attempted to contact all 64 Crime Stoppers chapters we identified as having compromised tips. (Six do not have publicly listed contact information.)
To date, 13 Crime Stoppers programs in Ontario and Saskatchewan said they would no longer accept anonymous tips.
The latest addition to the list was Ontario’s Brant-Brantford Crime Stoppers chapter, which made the announcement on its Facebook page.
Three Crime Stoppers chapters explicitly confirmed they were still accepting anonymous tips: New Brunswick and the districts of Thunder Bay and Sault Ste. Marie and Algoma.
The latter two programs both have statements on their websites — published before the Friday statement — stating that they were unable to accept tips intended for their local police services, which had paused their participation in Crime Stoppers. But they said they would still accept tips for “other participating police services in our region.”
CBC News has reached out to the three chapters about whether they will reconsider the decision, in light of their national organization’s new guidance.
OPP ‘pausing the promotion’ of program
CBC also contacted the biggest municipal police departments in the country that hadn’t yet commented on the breach to ask them if they intended to suspend their use of anonymous tips as a policing tool. Crime Stoppers sends tips to law enforcement when deemed necessary, but it works independently of the police.
At least 29 police units across Ontario, Manitoba, Nova Scotia and British Columbia said they had suspended their partnership with the Crime Stoppers program.
However, some, such as Calgary and Charlottetown, said they would continue accepting Crime Stoppers tips and that their use of the program “has not been paused.”
The office of Philippe Dufresne, Canada’s privacy commissioner, said Tuesday it is opening an investigation into a massive data breach. The probe will focus on Navigate360, an American company hired to manage Crime Stoppers tips.
Meanwhile, the Ontario Provincial Police confirmed that it was pausing the promotion of the Crime Stoppers program. However, people can still use it if they prefer to, a spokesperson said in a statement, and the agency will assess the information “as appropriate.”
The RCMP did not explicitly confirm whether it was still using anonymous Crime Stoppers tips for active investigations. Instead, it said it was aware that several chapters had paused their tip intake, and advised any potential tipsters to avoid sharing any identifiable information in their reports.
Lippert said that there could be long-term implications from police agencies’ distancing from Crime Stoppers, going beyond the use of anonymous tips in policing, due to the program’s “strong overlap” with law enforcement.
“It’s just hard to imagine Crime Stoppers being able to survive without a lot of the support,” he said.
For example, while Crime Stoppers’ reward money does not come from the police, many agencies do give their local chapters funding for other matters, such as special events or marketing campaigns, he said. Some have provided their chapters with physical offices, or have even assigned officers to serve as program co-ordinators and help investigate tips.
CCSA previously insisted on ‘continued operations’
The CCSA previously appeared take a different approach to how it addressed the breach and its relationship with Navigate360, even with the fallout after CBC’s initial investigation.
In an internal memo to local programs dated Oct. 22 and obtained by CBC News, president David J. Forster had advised them to direct all media inquiries to the national association, saying one of its key messaging points would be that Navigate360’s “security improvements support continued operations.”
The memo, which was sent the day after Toronto Crime Stoppers paused accepting tips, included a suggested response to potential questions from the public about why other local chapters continued to accept tips: “We continue to receive tips because of our confidence in the technical work completed by our third-party software provider, together with stronger procedures for handling information within Crime Stoppers.”
CBC News has reached out to Navigate360 for comment on the Friday statement.
