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New pawnshop registry speeds up recovery of stolen items
By
LYDA LONGA
DAYTONA BEACH -- Out of kindness, Mathew Deroche allowed an acquaintance to stay at his apartment for a week. He quickly regretted that idea when he came home from work one day and discovered that his temporary roommate had cleaned him out of everything from his TV to his video games, police said.
Luckily for Deroche, new technology at the Daytona Beach Police Department helped investigators find his stuff within a few minutes. It was all at a pawnshop just a few doors down from the police station. LeadsOnline, an Internet registry for pawnshops, is being hailed by investigators because it helps them quickly track down stolen goods that are taken to pawnshops.
What once took an entire day of searching through these businesses to find a victim's lifted lawn mower or missing miter saw is now found with the click of a computer mouse, said Daytona Beach Sgt. Billy Rhodes and Detective Grant Karcher.
State law requires pawnbrokers to itemize every object brought to them for sale and that the information is sent to a central local law enforcement agency. The Volusia County Sheriff's Office collects the data Daytona Beach uses. Pawnbrokers also must send the seller's name, a photo ID and a copy of the seller's right thumb print. The seller must also sign an affidavit stating that he or she is the owner of the items being sold, police said. The affidavit offers pawnshop owners a measure of protection, because they are not held liable if the property is stolen. If a pawnshop owner accepts goods he or she knows are stolen, though, dealing in stolen property could be charged, police said.
On April 1, the pawnshops took it a step further and also began entering all their information into the Leads on Line registry. "For us, it's just another step in the process," said Dan Harshaw, a co-owner of Jessup's of Daytona, a pawnshop on Beach Street.
Once a detective enters a description of missing items into the computer, every object that matches those descriptions will be displayed on the Leads on Line site, with the names of each pawnshop where the objects were sold and who sold them. In the past, Daytona Beach investigators had to send the information about stolen goods to the Sheriff's Office and then wait for personnel there to process it and call them back.
"That took weeks at a time," Rhodes said. "With LeadsOnline, we can find items within minutes as long as we have a description of the object and hopefully a serial number, too. When we have a suspect's name, it's even faster."
Earlier this month, it took Karcher only a few hours to locate Deroche's stolen items taken by suspect Jonathan Travis Pearson, Rhodes and Karcher said.
"The victim (Deroche) let Pearson stay at his house for a week, because he felt bad that he (the suspect) had nowhere to go," Karcher said. "And Pearson repaid him by stealing his stuff and taking it to a pawnshop." Gone was Deroche's TV, his game system, a video camera, a portable music player, a still camera and several video games.
When Karcher entered the suspect's name into the LeadsOnline program -- bingo. There in black and white was a list of all of Deroche's property, Karcher said.
Had Pearson's name not been available, investigators would simply have entered a description of each of Deroche's stolen items, Rhodes said. "It really helps if people write down the serial numbers and model numbers of all their property," Rhodes said. "That's really key when something is stolen. It helps us find the items much faster."
While all this technology is helping detectives get stolen property back to the rightful owner faster, one thing has not changed: Victims still must pay to get their pilfered items out of a pawnshop, and that includes interest and storage charges, said Harshaw of Jessup's. "It's like people are victimized twice," Karcher said.
© 2007 News-Journal Corporation
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