Toronto police suspend Crime Stoppers partnership after data breach

I was shocked. I did a double-take, read it again, and I thought, oh my, it's serious. That was James Lowry's reaction to hearing the news of the Crime Stoppers data breach, exposing the personal information of thousands of people who have provided tips to Crime Stoppers. Lowry, who spent 33 years as a Toronto police officer, says this could be dangerous. It affects your personal safety, and if information on your identity were to get out, that's extremely dangerous and a person could get killed. Lowry says there were countless investigations he worked on over the years that relied heavily on information provided by tips to Crime Stoppers. You do as much as you can from an investigative standpoint, but eventually without, you know, somebody coming forward and providing that needed key of information, you're stuck. If you've got an investigation on the go, and all of a sudden you receive a tip from a confidential informant, that may well crack your case. In its more than 40-year history, Toronto Crime Stoppers has received well over 150,000 tips that have led to more than 11,000 arrests. Those who provide information to the program are always assured it will be anonymous. Trust is a big thing when it comes to community safety. This former youth advocate in the Jane and Finch area says people who live in vulnerable communities are already reluctant to come forward to provide information to police. People might make the assumption that people are reluctant to come forward because they don't care or they don't care about their community. But in fact, that's not true. I think it's really about fear and safety of retaliation. He worries that this will make people think twice about coming forward in the future. It takes a long time for trust to be built up, if you think of any personal relationship in your life. And it takes one incident for all of that to be destroyed or really be harmed drastically. So now you're kind of back to having to rebuild that trust. He says it could take a long time before people feel safe reporting information to Crime Stoppers again. Greg Ross, CBC News, Toronto.