This is one of those things that’s probably state-specific. I’m in Ohio currently.
I had a camera and some lenses stolen from me. No leads - I left it unattended in an apartment complex parking lot and when I realized this it was gone.
I filed a police report. The officer that took it was pretty helpful. I told him that I didn’t have the serial numbers with me, but they’d be in a box at home and I’d have to have someone look for them later. He gave me a statement to fill out and told me to turn it in when I had those serial numbers. He also mentioned he’d go down to the pawn shop down the street to check with them in the meantime.
I filed the report, and 2 days later I called to ask what the procedure was for contacting pawn shops with the stolen item description. I talked to a detective at the police department. He was incredibly unhelpful. I was trying to ask him - do pawn shops submit a list of goods they buy to you at certain intervals, or do you submit a list of stolen goods to pawn shops and they instantly report back if someone tries to sell one of them, etc. Basically, trying to figure out if I would be notified right away if they caught the item, or if it would show up on some sort of weekly/monthly report later.
He gave me a rambling, confused response that said there was no system by which they would automatically check for my property at pawn shops. Pawn shops would not submit a list of items to check against stolen property, nor would the police send a list of stolen property to pawn shops. I could go to a pawn shop and ask if there’s an item fitting the description of the stolen item, but they’re not under legal obligation to actually answer my question and/or inform me if there was.
I’m going to wait until a shift change to try to talk to someone who seems to have some idea of what they’re talking about, but in the meantime I’ll try seeing what GQ knows. I’ll go to some actual pawn shops too - I’m sure the pawnbrokers know more than that guy did.
It seems to me like there must be some sort of system whereby either pawn shops report to the police, or police report to the pawn shops, to find stolen items. They have to keep a lot of paperwork and hold the item anyway - what are they doing that for, if there’s no way to actually figure out if the item is stolen in that time?
Also, related, are there any sort of electronic records or stolen asset tracking services who can assist me on this?
Your camera itself may be more helpful than the local police. Assuming yours was a DSLR, it was probably putting the camera’s serial numbers into each photo in what’s called EXIF data.
Eventually, someone’s going to take pictures with your camera and put them online. There are services like Stolen Camera Finder and Lenstag that crawl the web, looking for serial numbers.
Aside from that, it’s probably easier and faster to just take the police report and call your insurance agent.
Stolen Camera Finder is a cool idea, but by the time it gets to that point, it’ll probably be in the possession of someone who already bought it possibly in good faith, and so locating and reacquiring it certainly isn’t easy at that point. None of the pictures I’ve posted with the camera show up, anyway - I think saving it as a DNG strips out that metadata. I had to find a rare out of camera jpeg to get the serial number that way.
No insurance, either.
So my options are pretty much to monitor craigslist, ebay, and the pawn shops. But everyone has a conflicting story on the pawn shops. I went to one earlier, and the pawnbroker told me that he didn’t do any reporting to the police for new items - he only looked if the police specifically called them - which seems to be against Ohio law, which seems to say you need to submit a daily report. He, the pawnbroker, also told me that if I asked around about stolen gear I’d likely be blown off, and my best bet is to wait 2 weeks until they can put it on the shelves and try to find it that way.
I can’t believe there’s not an easy way to track serial numbers for pawned goods that police can use. Leadsonline.com appears to want to be that, but I can’t search their database, it’s law-enforcement only.
I have never heard of a stolen item being retrieved from a pawn shop in the US.
The story is always ‘find it in the pawn shop and buy it’.
I sincerely doubt there is any requirement for the police to monitor pawn shops. Until the www, that would have been a full-time job for one or two officers.
Sadly, it’s part and parcel of our police abdicating certain elements of their jobs to focus on higher visibility and more profitable avenues of Law Enforcement.
Property crimes against individuals are so “low priority” that they don’t even make a token attempt at solving them anymore.
Nothing changes really. When I was a kid in West Africa, theft was a pretty common problem. If you wanted your stuff back, you just sent someone down to the market to buy it back. Looking back, I am pretty sure that it was ransom rather than theft as this is exactly what they expected.
A pawn shop owner has no interest in identifying stolen property once it’s in his possession as it will be his loss. If he is honest, he may try to be sure that what is pledged is honestly come by; but who still has a receipt for granddad’s gold watch?
I don’t know what the law is in Ohio, but my sister had some tools stolen during a burglary that showed up in a pawn shop. She had all of the serial numbers, etc., but she couldn’t recover them without buying them back. I don’t remember if she did so.
Ohio pawn shops are required to report all newly pledged or purchased property on a daily basis. Unfortunately, it looks like crooks can get around that (to a degree) just by going to the next county.
The last time I sold something at a pawn shop, I asked the owner when it would be put up for sale. He said he’s required to hold it for 30 days in case it was stolen. This is New York.
You also had to provide a valid picture ID to sell an item.
This is what I thought too, but the detective I spoke to said there was no automatic reporting of any sort, and when I talked to a pawnbroker who seemed to be trying to be honest and helpful, he also said he doesn’t do routine reporting, he only checks if the police specifically come to him asking about a particular item.
Since the detective I spoked to also was uninterested in putting out any sort of query to pawn shops, and told me that they might just blow me off/lie to me if I do it myself, it seems like I have no way to find out if my camera is sitting in the back of a pawn shop right now.
Which seems incredibly shitty. I get that it’s hard to find a missing generic looking gold ring. But I have a model number and serial number, and pawn shops keep records of all that, and hold the item specifically to allow time to check if the item is stolen. But it seems like despite the entire purpose of that record-keeping and holding to track down stolen items, and the fact that I have exactly the information they’d need to make a recovery, no one is bothering to actually make that happen, and there’s no automated system in place to make that happen.
What the fuck?
I’m willing to buy them back at the price the pawn shop paid if I had to. I just want it to be located so I know where to go.
If I found something of mine in a pawn shop and could prove it, I wouldn’t buy it. I would tell the owner it was mine and start walking out with it. He would probably try to stop me and I would ask him to call the police. Then I would show the police report. If he doesn’t want to be arrested for being a fence, he will probably let me walk out. If a third person buys it, he is similarly out the money.
The may lie to you if you say you’re looking for your stolen camera. You need to pretend you’re looking to buy a camera, and ask to see what they have.
Wrong. Many large cities have a “pawn detail”. They get these daily reports and follow up as best they can.
Wrong. They do make attempts. How diligent that effort is can vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Manpower, etc.
Not under Ohio law.
If I ran that pawn shop in Ohio, I’d indeed have you arrested. I would not be arrested for being a fence. I bought/pawned the item in good faith. Ohio law says you can buy the item back for what I , in good faith, paid for it.
What Samclem says. We live in a market economy. Markets don’t work unless buyers can be confident that, when they buy stuff in the market, they’ve bought it. As between two innocent parties, the mug from whom the item was stolen, and the mug who bought it in good faith in a market transaction, the law will usually come down on the side of the latter mug. If the former mug feels that the risk of loss of title is not one that he can afford to run, he can insure his goods against theft.
For property where, societally, we are not prepared to allow that to happen, the usual solution is for the state to maintain a title registration system. There is no such system for cameras.
Talked to another detective today. She knew how to form complete sentences, so it was a nice change this time. She told me that the case was never passed to the detective department, so there was nothing they could do about it. It was still with the officer who took the statement.
So I asked to speak to him today, and they said he’d contact me, but obviously that didn’t happen.
She told me I could go around and ask pawn shops myself, that they’d tell me if they had the item. But then I actually went to pawn shops, handing out a sheet I made with item descriptions, serial number, police case number, etc. And the first pawnbroker I went to said “I can’t tell you if I do have it back there. I’m not allowed to discuss who pawned what, it’s a violation of privacy” - that sounds dumb to me, I’m not snooping on my ex girlfriend or something, I’m giving her the serial number of an item registered with the police as stolen. So I can’t tell if she was full of shit, or that’s actually the way pawnbrokers operate.
She said it’s normal procedure for the police to send out faxes to advise of stolen items. Not in my case, apparently, because I basically asked two detectives for that and neither were interested or thought it was normal.
The law apparently says that pawn shops have to make a daily report to local law enforcement of bought items. 2 pawnbrokers have now told me that they never do that. One told me they make a weekly report.
No one seems to know what the fuck they’re talking about and everyone is giving me conflicting information. My camera could’ve been sitting in a local pawn shop for a week and no one would ever know about it.
Several weeks ago, a woman here in my town called the police to report that her son’s $4,000 wheelchair was stolen off their front porch, and also posted a picture of it on her Facebook page. :eek: Upon seeing that picture, I knew that someone probably thought it was a high-end stroller, and figured that they probably took it to one of several stores here in town that pays cash for “gently used” children’s items.
And I was right. Someone who worked at that store saw the story, and the picture, and in turn called the police to report that the wheelchair was at their store.
IDK how much was paid for it, or if the person was stupid enough to give their real name and address (you’d be surprised how often they do) or was caught some other way. In any case, the family got their child’s wheelchair back.
This won’t work (yet). My understanding is that items are unsellable, off the shelf, for 14 days (sale) or 30 days (pawn) before they can be put out for display. The purpose of this waiting period is, at least in part, to give time to recover stolen goods. Which is why it’s so damn frustrating that no one seems to give a shit about helping me see if it might be sitting in the back room of a pawn shop right now, and the pawn brokers give me conflicting information about whether or not they’d even tell me if I showed up at their door with the description and serial number. The laws are set up for exactly this sort of recovery. I have the serial number, a relatively uncommon brand/model, an exact description (and likely a group of related items that would be sold as a package) - I’m pretty much an ideal case for finding my shit. And yet there are things I can’t do as a civilian, and law enforcement seems uninterested in giving a modicum of effort to help me at this point.
I couldn’t see the item in the showroom until after it’s out for sale, and by that point, there’s a risk someone else will have bought it. I also will be travelling back home soon, so I won’t have time to do that myself.
If You will, what city/county are you dealing with?
They are correct in that they can’t give you the info. Privacy laws.
Just to give you my qualifications about the matter, many of you know I’ve been in the coin biz in Ohio for 40 years. So we have similar laws governing our purchases.
There aren’t many places in Ohio where the pawn shop wouldn’t have been required to send that into to the local police in a few days.