LITTLE ROCK — Criminals cross the jurisdictional boundaries all the time. So do the tips that law-enforcement agencies get about those criminals.
In order to better use and share investigative resources, the Pulaski County sheriff's office has reached out to law-enforcement agencies all around central Arkansas in an attempt to create a regional Crime Stoppers information and tip service to keep each other - and the public - better informed.
Sheriff Doc Holladay and county Crime Stoppers board Chairman Steve Goss have scheduled a meeting Tuesday in North Little Rock and invited officials from five county sheriff's offices, three city police departments and the Arkansas State Police to discuss the idea.
"Right now I don't work with anybody at Pulaski County other than Sheriff Holladay," said Garland County Sheriff Larry Sanders, one of those invited. "This would be very welcome from my standpoint to create some relationships with other agencies and maybe get some better information and some more bad guys."
Garland County has no Crime Stoppers program, which typically offers cash for tips with a promise of anonymity to turn up evidence and witnesses in cases investigators find tough to crack. Sanders said his county doeshave a small fund the Quorum Court sets aside to occasionally pay for information, but not one as rigorously organized as Crime Stoppers.
Faulkner County Sheriff Karl Byrd said he, too, planned to attend.
"This gives us a much broader reach and more of an ability to help other agencies as well," he said. "So many times you'll have a guy who does a crime in Conway and he's from Little Rock or vice versa. With this idea, not only can we get our information out about who we're looking for, we can also put out what we're looking for, like an m.o. or kind of the style of a crime. That's very beneficial."
Because Crime Stoppers by nature includes a public-information component, Byrd said his interest was piqued.
"One of the best tools law enforcement has is a good line of communication with the public," he said. "The public sees a lot more than we do."
Goss, also a member of the Pulaski County Quorum Court, said such an effort was necessary. He cited the case of Todd Bostian, shot dead in Garland County in July by a law-enforcement sniper after piling up charges that included kidnapping in three different jurisdictions.
"That was one of those things that made us think maybe we should expand our territory," Goss said.
The Pulaski County sheriff's office and police departments in North Little Rock, Sherwood, Jacksonville and Maumelle are members of the county's Crime Stoppers program. Little Rock police have their own.
One benefit to banding together, Goss said, was providing help to smaller agencies that do not have much investigatory firepower on their own. A letter announcing the meeting and dated Aug. 7 went to the state police, sheriff's offices in Faulkner, Garland, Lonoke, Perry and Saline counties and the police departments in Cabot, Conway and Benton.
Goss said the idea first occurred to him when Benton Police Chief Kirk Lane, a former Pulaski County sheriff's office captain, asked how his agency could get involved with Crime Stoppers. When Bostian tore through Sherwood and North Little Rock after kidnapping his girlfriend in Ward and turned up in Garland County, Goss said, he felt an urgent desire to make something happen.
The meeting promises a free lunch to those who attend, but Goss said he hopes people come to listen as well.
"We want to tell them what we've got to offer, absolutely," he said. "But we also want to tell them what we'd need from them."
The biggest item: fundraising help. North Little Rock has the only chamber of commerce that sponsors the money paid in exchange for information, Goss said. Other private donors make up the rest. At any given moment, Goss said, there is between $2,500 and $6,500 in that fund.
"We're not looking for anything out of their budgets, no public money at all," Goss said. "Just some help getting our fund up to a higher level, to where maybe we can offer some more reward money."
State police spokesman Bill Sadler said his agency would send representatives as well. He said the state police's interest was "simple."
"By sharing information and comparing investigative files among law enforcement officers across a larger piece of real estate," he wrote in an e-mail, "the officers stand a better chance at catching the bad guys and closing multiple cases sometimes in as many as two or three counties."
Arkansas, Pages 7, 9 on 08/24/2009