Sheriff’s Office gets anonymous tip line for texting

Sources of messages will be scrambled

The Del Norte County Sheriff’s Office has implemented a new way for citizens to submit anonymous tips about crimes.

People can now send a text from their cell phone to a program that will scramble any personal identifiers and pass pertinent information about crimes to the Sheriff’s Office.

“The nice thing is that it’s anonymous,” said Sheriff Dean Wilson, adding that providing a way for information to be passed along via text will reach out to a younger culture entrenched in cell phone use.

People simply need to text “dnsotip,” followed by the information, to 847411.

When a text is sent to the program, a personal ID automatically generated will be used as the gateway to communicate with law enforcement.

Authorities can carry on a dialogue with the tipsters for several days through the program, if they are willing.

If the person does not want to continue texting to authorities, he or she can text ‘Stop’ to the program, which will disable any further communication.

Each officer within the Sheriff’s Office has been assigned an ID tag to be able to personally converse with anyone passing along information.

The tips are stored in a database and can be referred to several months later as evidence or for ongoing investigations.

Videos and pictures can also be sent by tipsters.

Tips can also be submitted to the Del Norte County Sheriff’s Office Facebook page by click on the “submit a tip” tab.

Reach Anthony Skeens at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it