Crime Stoppers - writing their own rules?

Boone County Watchdog (www.boonecountywatchdog.blogspot.com/) has been dogging Boone County Crime Stoppers (BCCS) for some time, trying to find out why they can keep operating but not comply with state laws on registration as a charitable trust.

Now, gee, that sounds familiar. Visit that website and read about the efforts to force BCCS into compliance. Actually, no citizen should have to do more than make one phone call and, after that, the "officials" should take over. Isn't that the way it is supposed to work? After all, it's the folks at the Attorney General's office and at a State's Attorney's office who get paid the big bucks to make compliance happen.  Well, at least that's what some would think.

Which brings me back to my favorite, almost-invisible Crime Stoppers organization in our county - Crime Stoppers for McHenry County (CSMC). I say "almost-invisible", because they seem to be trying to operate in secret. It took me months to pry a contact address out of the McHenry County Sheriff's Department, and all I could get was a P.O. Box. MCSD refused to provide names of any of the officers or board members of CSMC.

Is CSMC a tax-exempt, 501(c)(3) organization? To be a member of CrimeStoppers USA, it must be. There is just one small, sticky detail - IRS doesn't know about CSMC!

And way back in 1987 CSMC started the process to register with the Illinois Attorney General Charitable Trust Bureau - a requirement if you are going to solicit money in Illinois. The process must have been a little hard for them to follow, because in 24 years they have never completed it. And they are not registered today with the Bureau. And up until now the Bureau has apparently never missed them.

It turns out they might not even know where their corporate records are.

So far, I've been able to identify only Helen Torscher (President or Secretary?) and Richard Heizer as Board members. Helen won't communicate with me, and Richard hasn't returned a phone call I placed to him in early March. So I guess that means he won't communicate with me, either.

The way it works with me is, the more they try to hide information, the harder I did.

I started out trying to reach someone in charge to tell them about a problem with the tip line, which is answered by a dispatcher at the McHenry County Sheriff's Department. No one at the sheriff's department would even say whether they supervised the dispatchers on the tip line which, of course, they do.