Four decades after PC Keith Blakelock was hacked to death with machetes and knives in the 1985 Broadwater Farm riots in Tottenham, the investigation remains open. Three men had their murder convictions quashed in 1991. A fourth man was cleared by a jury in 2014. Like any cold case, a new piece of information is the best hope police have.
“Four hundred people witnessed the murder of PC Keith Blakelock, but there was a complete wall of silence,” Alexa Loukas tells MyLondon. This is how Crimestoppers started in the UK. The charity is independent from the police and government, guaranteeing anonymity for people who want to share sensitive information without speaking to old bill.
We interviewed Alexa, the regional manager for London, because we wanted her to explain exactly what happens when someone rings or fills in an online form. ‘Can Crimestoppers trace me?’ is something people often search for. Put simply, the answer is ‘No’.
Born in Alburquerque, New Mexico, Crimestoppers started in response to a murder in a city plagued by criminality. In fiction, it was the backdrop to Breaking Bad and Walter White’s meth empire. In reality, the city just called in dozens of American soldiers to prop-up local law enforcement as it faces another acute crime wave.
After student Michael Carmen was shot dead in a petrol station robbery in July 1976, Detective Greg MacAleese had no witnesses and no idea whodunnit. But Greg had worked on his local newspaper, and came up with a media-savvy approach to catch the gunman.
Local TV and radio broadcast a reenactment of the murder, promising anonymity to anyone who called in. Within three days, two men were arrested and charged with Carmen’s murder. After success with the same method on a rape case, the Albuquerque Police Department was convinced and Crimestoppers now has programs around the world.
Tory businessman Lord Michael Ashcroft helped to establish the charity in the UK in 1988, three years after PC Blakelock’s murder. While the near decapitation of a police officer remains unsolved, Crimestoppers has taken 2.2million actionable calls since it began, leading to more than 151,000 arrests and charges.
Taking us under the bonnet of an organisation her mum still confuses with BBC Crimewatch, Alexa told MyLondon how it all works…
‘Spurious’ calls and ‘warm handovers’
Operating out of a secret head office in South London – ‘For obvious reasons we keep it on the down low’ – Crimestoppers takes around 1,800 contacts a day, on the phone or, more commonly, online.
Numbers and IP addresses are scrambled at the point of contact, calls are never recorded, and any paper notes are thrown into a shredder every few hours.
This means calls cannot be traced, and voices cannot be identified. Staff are also trained not to take personal details. If the caller inadvertently gives away identifying information, this will not be passed on to the police.
“For example, if I ring up and I say ‘My neighbour at 10 Station Road’, we will take out that ‘my neighbour’ bit. We’re very, very thorough about doing that,” Alexa assures me.
“We’ve got very highly trained staff because we know that that call might be the only time that that person is going to contact us. It’s quite a brave thing to do, to ring up.”
Single sources are treated with special caution.
“If you’ve seen your neighbour in the garden with a gun, we’re very, very careful about taking that information from you. Because essentially you might be the only person that knows that. And your neighbour will know, it’s pretty obvious,” Alexa says.
Inevitably, gang members and serving prisoners contact the charity too.
“I hate the word ‘grassing up’, but grassing up on other gang members. Yes, we get that,” Alexa says, “We know we do, because of the type of information that we take, but because we can’t identify anyone, or who they are, we have no idea. We don’t discriminate at all.”
They also get ‘spurious’ calls. For example: “There might be someone ringing up about their neighbour, who doesn’t like them.”
But that’s why information is treated as that: information. Only police can corroborate a single source into intelligence. Records of disseminated reports may also be corroborated by later reports. Something that looked spurious, might suddenly stand out.
“On ones like that we will always do a bit more digging and decide what we are and aren’t going to send over. We call it what’s actionable or not.”
Once information is received, either online or typed into a special document by call centre workers, it is triaged (assessed for a usefulness, reliability, and identification concerns), then disseminated to the relevant police force, or other partners like the National Crime Agency and port authorities.
And even if they wanted to, Alexa says: “There’s absolutely no way that we can go back to the person if they contact us on the telephone. That’s it. You put the phone down, you’re done. We do recommend that anyone contacting us wipes their call history from their phone.”
The only way Crimestoppers can go back to someone is if they opt-in to ‘two-way contact’ with their online service. The charity can then manage a conversation between the source and a detective, who might want to clarify the information.
“The police are not allowed to task someone,” Alexa says, “They cannot say to you ‘Could you just go and find out the name of that’.”
Instead the charity can arrange a ‘warm handover’ with the consent of the source, which means providing them with a detective’s phone number.
“But that is where our involvement ends,” Alexa says, “Because, again, that is then not anonymous. Even if the copper doesn’t take their name, they’ve got a number, they can find out who it is.”
After 25 years working for a local authority, Alexa thought she might be at a disadvantage without a policing background, but she quickly realised independence comes before everything.
“I know when I started working, I was like, yeah, it’s not really anonymous, but it absolutely is,” she says.
“We do a lot of campaigning on the service, and it is a very simple service, I think it is. But trying to convince a member of the public that it is completely anonymous is quite a hard sell because it’s hard to believe.
“We work really closely with those organisations, but we’re always stressing, to the point of it becoming boring, that we are independent from the police because we know that if members of the public think we’re part of the police, that is going to be a huge barrier.”
‘Everything’s on lockdown’
Inside the headquarters: “Everything’s on lockdown.” Mobile phones are banned, they must be kept in a locker, and the IT systems are ‘highly developed’ with regular checks to ensure data security. This is more important than ever with 60 per cent of reports now made online.
If members of the public call in with a piece of ‘real time’ information, the charity also has the ability to pass it quickly onto the relevant police intelligence team, while still maintaining the layer of guaranteed anonymity. The charity has not broken this promise in 37 years.
Crimestoppers prides itself on this guarantee, but this makes it difficult to promote their successes. “We do have case studies, but we’re very, very careful about it,” Alexa says, sharing some examples where any identifying details have been stripped out.
They include a man wanted on recall to prison who dragged a woman into a trees and raped her, a violent robber, and a shooting murder suspect. All three were charged after Crimestoppers got involved with the police appeal.
One case Alexa can reference in more detail caught headlines in 2019 when a violent robbery gang accidentally locked themselves inside a jewellery shop on Green Lanes in Haringey. A female staff member was put in a headlock and dragged to the ground.
Crimestoppers helped with the appeal, which included CCTV grabs of the suspects trying to escape. It led to a conviction and seven-year sentence for Andre Elliott , recognised by his large tattoos, but two more suspects remain outstanding.
When the charity is not taking requests from detectives to put out an appeal on a high-profile cold case murder, there is a steady stream of information coming through about drugs.
This week they got a report about someone planning to sell party drugs at a specific venue, and someone illegally renting out someone else’s property to be used as a safe house.
The charity sent 15,000 reports to Met Intel last year, which is the highest number to any force in the country. Eight thousand of those were for drug trafficking and supply, with drink/drug driving and drug manufacture coming second and third.
Lower down the list in London last year there were over 1,100 firearms reports, 870 blade or knife reports, over 300 reports of assault and harassment, over 230 reports for murder or other killings, and over 90 reports of modern slavery.
“We help solve thousands of crimes every year. Crimes that might not have been solved if we weren’t here,” Alexa says.
‘We don’t know if we’re paying a gang member’
When nine-year-old Olivia Pratt-Korbel was gunned down in Liverpool in August 2022, an anonymous businessman donated £100,000, matched by Lord Ashcroft, to produce the biggest reward Crimestoppers has ever offered.
The £200,000 wasn’t claimed though. In fact, 99.98 per cent of the rewards never are.
In London there are regular rewards of up to £20,000 for new information that leads to a conviction in an unsolved case. In recent months the charity has offered the sum in relation to the murder of Imran Maroof , killed in East Ham last year, and Ola Raji , killed in Peckham in 2015.
Alexa thinks the cash sum should be more in London, where the number of reports are ‘pretty low’ per head of population and the cost of living is higher.
If someone wants to claim, they need to specify this at the outset. The charity will give them a unique reference number which they can cite when calling back as the case progresses. If there is a conviction, Crimestoppers will assess how much cash they can claim.
In Olivia’s case, there were more than 100 calls on the day the lines opened. If multiple people call in with the same information, the cash would be split between claimants.
Alexa says the payment is always in cash and ‘completely untraceable’. Claimants are sent to a bank outside of their area at a specific time, with a reference code that lets them collect the cash reward. They are not asked for proof of identity, so they could send someone else.
When I suggest it all sounds ‘quite shady’, Alexa agrees, but shadiness is baked into the deal.
“We don’t know if we’re paying a reward to another gang member, another drug dealer, we have no idea. And that is one of the things that potentially could happen. But because of that anonymity, which is truly 100 per cent, there’s no way we can know.
“We get prisoners ringing us about stuff in prison or giving us information about things that are going on outside. So we know it happens. But primarily our objective is to prevent and help solve and stop crime. Serious crime. The kind that is really harmful to people.”
As well as eyewatering cash rewards, Crimestoppers also operates a ‘most wanted gallery’, where mugshots and photos of wanted criminals are frequently displayed on the website, often leading the wanted person to hand themselves in. It gets about 30,000 hits a month.
For one week a year, they also run Operation Capture in the Costa Del Sol, displaying images of the UK’s 10 most wanted criminals thought to be hiding on the Spanish coast on billboards and the side of a van. Last year a Spanish policeman recognised someone drinking at his local bar and called it in.
Alexa thinks this method is particularly effective because: “Most British criminals in Spain stick out. They are not very good at blending in.”
Changing the narrative on ‘grassing’
A crucial part of Alexa’s job is outreach, especially when it comes to kids. Crimestoppers brands itself as Fearless when reaching out to young teenagers – often the hardest audience to connect to, but also at the most risk of grooming and County Lines.
One of the biggest obstacles is ‘grassing’.
“Kids, even at a very young age from maybe five onwards, they know about grassing,” Alexa says.
“That is something that they’re learning at school. My grandsons know. They’re eight and ten. They’ve been talking about grassing for a few years.
“It starts with don’t grass, don’t snitch. Snitches get stitches. Snaking. All of that kind of thing.
“So part of the work we do is a culture change around being young people, being an active bystander and not seeing it as kind of snitching. It’s standing up for the loved ones, for the people that you love.
“It’s a really hard one. If you knew your friend was involved in County Lines or holding a weapon for someone, would you ring?”
While Alexa completely understands when people hold onto information out of fear for their safety, she believes ‘moral obligation’ should outweigh any stigma attached to it.
Framing it as someone who steps in to help a Tube passenger getting abused, her view is: If you would stop someone getting hurt in real life, why not help them in another way.
Alexa says working with families who have lived experience of crime has been one of the most important aspects of her job, which she has done for more than eight years.
Pastor Lorraine Jones, whose son Dwayne was killed in 2014 , and Yvonne Godwin, whose son Lawson was killed in 2010 , have worked with the charity to give it a real voice.
“Partnership working is absolutely key. I can’t do stuff in London on my own at all. And it needs to be authentic and it needs to be credible,” Alexa says.
This year the charity also wants women and girls to consider contacting them ahead of Notting Hill Carnival if they know someone who plans to bring a weapon. A new campaign will launch this month.
But Alexa says it won’t just focus on the potential danger: “It’s about reinforcing the message that Carnival is about joy, love, fun, music, just enjoying things.”
You can read about the Notting Hill Carnival campaign and the Summer Safer Streets campaign here.
Got a tip, a court date, or some gossip? Please email [email protected] or WhatsApp 07580255582.
Don’t miss out on the latest crime stories from across London. Sign up to MyLondon’s Court & Crime newsletter HERE.
