You name the crime. These days, it seems, there's a cash reward offered for information to solve it. Yet the effectiveness of such monetary incentives to fight wrongdoing remains unclear.
Once limited largely to "dead or alive" offers for suspected killers on the lam, rewards are now routinely announced for far-lesser crimes as well, including theft, vandalism and animal mutilation. Some rewards are huge, others modest, particularly when compared with the damage wrongdoers have done. The reward announced in the aftermath of $350,000 of vandalism at a Hampton, Va., school: just $100.
Some bounty offers these days also seem to be motivated as much by outrage, politics or publicity seeking as by law enforcement priorities. A $125,000 reward, partly funded by the American Legion, was just posted for arrest of thieves who took an inexpensive but controversially symbolic war-memorial cross from federal land near a Southern California interstate. A left-wing corporate governance watchdog announced a $50,000 reward for information leading to the bribery conviction of any executive of Massey Energy, operator of the West Virginia coal mine where 29 miners died in a recent explosion. Massey has denied wrongdoing. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) recently posted a $5,000 reward for information about the "alleged whipping of a tiger" by circus employees.
In Pictures: 20 Current Cash Rewards
"The use of rewards is on the rise," says Alexandra Natapoff, a Loyola Law School professor in Los Angeles who has studied the use of such financial incentives. She wrote a recent book, Snitching, about governmental use of informants. "But I don't know if rewards work,'' she says.
Indeed, what is probably the largest and most publicized reward offer out there now--$27 million for the head of Osama Bin Laden--remains unclaimed. The U.S. State Department put up $25 million, with the remaining $2 million coming from the aviation industry. A long-standing $2 million reward for Boston mobster James (Whitey) Bulger, suspected in 18 murders and on the lam since 1995, has produced lots of tips but no Bulger.
Ditto a $5 million reward for the paintings by Rembrandt, Degas and Vermeer taken in the celebrated 1990 break-in of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, also in Boston. (There was no immediate word about a reward in the $120 million theft Wednesday of Picassos and Matisses from the Paris Museum of Modern Art.)
Indeed, despite often hefty rewards, none of the other eight on a 2008 Forbes list of the world's most wanted has been caught. However, Rewards for Justice, the quarter-century-old State Department anti-terrorism program that targeted Bin Laden, says that more than 50 people have received upward of $80 million in rewards. Its website credits rewards with playing a "significant role" in the capture of Ramzi Yousef after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. And the umbrella group of Crime Stoppers, a 34-year-old program found in hundreds of communities that facilitates anonymous tipsters, says it has paid $79 million in rewards.
One reason for doubt about the overall efficacy of rewards, Natapoff says, is that hard data is difficult to come by. "The government wants us to accept at face value" that rewards solve crimes, she says, "but it gives us no evidence." Indeed, the fact that a reward was paid doesn't negate the possibility that the case-cracking tip would have come in without a reward offer.
Natapoff believes the feds are the biggest single payer of rewards. citing a decade-old estimate of $100 million a year. In addition, by one estimate, since 1986 the federal government has shelled out $2.7 billion of rewards in so-called qui tam cases. Although technically not criminal, these are lawsuits that private citizens file against third parties alleging defrauding of the government, which then takes over the case.
Certainly, federal agencies long have embraced rewards as a law-enforcement tool, although some developed a reputation for being chintzy. One such agency was the Internal Revenue Service. But in 2006 Congress ordered the IRS to set up a Whistleblower Office, look at all tips and pay a minimum 15% bounty on collections. The tips are pouring in, along with lawsuits seeking rewards.
As Natapoff sees it, American law enforcement is simply embracing capitalism. "The government has gone to a free-market model," she says. "Everything is for sale."
There is one practical advantage to the use of rewards. The U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment puts limits on the ability of governmental agents to collect information, including a requirement that most searches need prior judicial approval after a showing of "probable cause." But there is almost no limit on the use by government of information voluntarily provided by private citizens or, say, Google.
In Pictures: 20 Current Cash Rewards
See Also:
Regifting; Obama, The Nobel Prize and the IRS
