The Alaska Department of Public Safety announced that it’s launching an anonymous crime tips tool to fight crime with a new app to help residents view alerts and submit anonymous tips from their smartphone or computer. AKtips puts a new crime-fighting tool into the hands of Alaskans of all ages.
Department of Public Safety Public Information Officer Austin McDaniel:
“This new crime tip tool can be accessed by downloading an app onto your smartphone. It’s available for both Android and iPhone. Additionally you can log onto the DPS website, which is dps.alaska.gov/tips and submit anonymous crime tips on there. If you don’t have access to a computer or a smart phone, you can also text your tip. What you’re going to do there is text AKTIP followed by your message or your tip to 847411. All of these tips that are received by the department of public safety and state troopers, are anonymous. We don’t know who sends them unless that person chooses to identify themselves. This isn’t a replacement for calling or reporting emergencies to 911 or reporting items where you might want a trooper to respond to your location, to your local trooper post non-emergency line, but what this will do is allow the public to share anonymous crime tips with law enforcement. It will also allow the troopers to respond back to the person who submitted the tip if they put that in via text message or via the AKtips app. This program is pretty similar to Crime Stoppers, however there are no rewards attached it.”
McDaniel also says:
“It’s also important to note that this is Alaska State Trooper/Department of Public Safety tool. If you reside in Anchorage, you’re going to find more success maybe calling the Anchorage Police Department or the Kenai Police Department, Soldotna Police Department, any of the local police areas that have coverage in the cities, you’d be better served going to them directly versus through this app. If you live in Alaska State Trooper area or you’re traveling through an Alaska State Trooper area and see something suspicious, certainly go through and submit your tips through the AKtips app.”
When choosing to use the AKtips app, the Department of Public Safety remind the public that the technology removes all identifying information before law enforcement sees the tips. The deployment and development of the app was funded through a Department of Homeland Security grant and was developed by Tip 411.