Guardian Tipline is being built as a community tip line where anonymity is a property of the system rather than a promise on a poster — and where a tip is routed to the unit that can act on it instead of a shared inbox.
People withhold information because they do not believe a tip is really anonymous, or because the last one seemed to go nowhere. Guardian Tipline is being designed around both objections at once: anonymity built into the data model, and routing that puts a tip in front of the unit that can act on it.
The design discards identifying call data at intake and does not retain a raw transcript — so anonymity does not depend on a policy that could be changed later.
A tip is classified as it arrives and sent to the unit that handles that kind of information, rather than pooling in one inbox nobody owns.
The same intake is intended to serve a school district as well as a police department, with each routing to its own people.
The intent is that an investigator can ask a follow-up question and the tipster can answer, without either side learning who the other is.
Guardian Tipline is in design. If your department or district would use it, the most useful thing you can do is tell us what would make it worth trusting.
Talk to us about the pilot →