I don’t seem to hear much about people getting the reward for information leading to the capture or conviction of someone. I wonder how many technicalities there are that lead to them not meeting certain requirements.
If I snitched on a criminal to get reward money, I wouldn’t want that to be common knowledge. Not because I have any moral qualms about “snitching”, I just don’t want to be a possible target of retaliation from that criminal’s associates, friends, or family.
Here was a very big case where several of the donors refused to pay:
This.
The one case of which I have personal knowledge, where a family offered a big reward, they were absolutely sure that a certain couple of people knew a certain something and weren’t coming forward due to fear of consequences, not the least of which was being expelled from their university, so they tried to make the reward so tempting, people would forego a degree from a relatively high-ranked state school in order to claim it.
No one ever claimed it.
The family could have been wrong; the reward may not have been tempting enough. There may have been factors the family did not consider.
The part I wonder about is “information leading to the arrest of…”. No arrest is ever made on the basis of any one piece of information: It’s a bunch of pieces that fit together. If one witness comes forward and says “The perpetrator was a woman”, and another says “The perpetrator had red hair”, and another says “The perpetrator was wearing a fedora and a trenchcoat”, and another says “The perpetrator left the city on a boat flying a red, white, and green flag”, and all of those pieces of information contribute towards the arrest, do they all get the reward?
I watched a program once that addressed this. Apparently, CrimeStoppers pays out in cash (up to $1000) so there is no paper trail to protect the snitches.
ETA: Yep, here:
https://www.crimestoppersusa.org/profile/#:~:text=Local%20Crime%20Stoppers%20programs%20are,arrest%20of%20criminals%20and%20fugitives.