Using The Web To Recover Stolen Goods
Property crimes require a huge investment of time and investigative energy by law enforcement officials attempting to recover the stolen items. Traditionally pawn shops cooperated with police officers, often filing several sets of detailed documents to various agencies interested in recovering the property.
The process also meant pawn shop owners and police officers had to sift through massive quantities of paper tickets, and some agencies even began entering the data into their individual computer databases.
With the introduction of Law Enforcement Automated Database Search (l.e.a.d.s.) online, police officers can access pawn shop records from around the country in order to locate a missing item.
Officers at national, state, and local levels can search the database, contact owners of the shops and visually confirm an items’ identity, decreasing response time to a property crime which increases the chances of recovery.
Over 1,000 pawn shops and secondhand stores nationwide list 17.5 million items that can be accessed by more than 400 law enforcement agencies in 38 states.
Abstracted by the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center(NLECTC) from the Police and Security News (08/03) Vol. 19, No. 4, P. 56; Siuru, Bill.
