Pawnshop owners call for electronic police database,
City committee supports system to help track sellers of stolen goods
Pawnshop owners are happy to help the city crack down on stolen property sales, and resurrecting a police database might be one way to do that, says the association that represents owners of used-goods stores across the country.
Dean Robins, acting president of the Canadian Pawn and Second Hand Dealers Association, has for years advocated for an electronic database of all items hocked at used-goods shops to assist police in their investigations, while not infringing on privacy laws.
He supports the decision from Ottawa’s protective services committee on Wednesday to review Ontario’s Pawnbrokers Act in a bid to change the law or find ways to better regulate the industry. As it stands, police across the province say they lack the ability they once had to track stolen items.
“The only way to do it is electronically,” Robins said. “We need a database that we can use and the police can use.”
Ottawa police used to have an electronic database of the names of people who brought items to pawnshops, but Ontario’s privacy commissioner shut that down six years ago and ordered the 44,000 names and 266,000 transaction records destroyed.
Police now rely on store owners to bring in paper reports with details of the items, and those reports are often illegibly written by hand.
A database that allows store owners to input the information would give police easy access to all items when conducting investigations, says Robins, who has operated the Swap and Shop in Ottawa for 15 years.
But police would need to go further than just having information about each item. They need to identify the people selling the property in some way in order to find trends, said Dan Parkinson, the Cornwall police chief who has long called for such a database.
He and the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police have lobbied the province for more than a decade to change what they call an outdated Pawnbrokers Act, but have had no success.
One proposal is to have a database that tracks people by an identification number. Police could then see if someone is regularly selling property, perhaps at several stores.
“In order for us to get any more information from that number, we would need some sort of approval,” Parkinson said. “That way, once we’ve identified a trend, we could then go behind the curtain and see who it is.”
Store owners could, of course, just not include stolen merchandise in the database, but “at least it would be a step in the right direction,” Robins said.
Coun. Mathieu Fleury, who was pleased his motion to review the Pawnbrokers Act was unanimously supported by the protective services committee, wants to make sure any proposed strategies apply to all used-goods stores, a point that was echoed by Dave Stinson who has owned Howard’s Pawn Shop on Carling Avenue for 19 years.
“We have pawnshops written on our doors, so there’s a certain stigma that comes with that, but there are lots of other stores that sell used items as well,” he said.
Stinson and other owners point to any stores that sell used guitars, video games or gold, suggesting these outlets should be looked at as well.
Both Stinson and Robins say there are usually just a few store owners who have given the industry a bad name. They say they gladly work with police and have established a reputation that deters thieves from trying to hock merchandise at their shops.
They also recognize that fewer people turn to stores to sell stolen property because more sales are ending up on Internet sites.