Shannon Matthews

[17th March 2008]

Since the safe rescue of missing schoolgirl Shannon Matthews last Friday, there have been a number of misleading reports in the media about the role of Crimestoppers and a delay in the police acting on information passed to us.

We want to reassure the public that when Crimestoppers receives information anonymously about criminals or criminal behaviour it passes this information to the police for them to consider and where appropriate, take action. Once the information is passed to the police by the charity our involvement ceases. At no point would we ever delay sending on this information as Crimestoppers appreciates the time sensitivity of police investigations.

In the case of Shannon Matthews, Crimestoppers received 44 intelligence logs which were passed to West Yorkshire police. None of these logs named the suspect, Michael Donovan, or gave his address details.