Pawn shop products change hands before they get their price tag. There's a common goal among police and pawnshops to make sure none of it got there illegally.
House Bill 550's goal is to get all pawn shops on board with an online system, making it easier for agencies to search items if they get sold outside the city where they're stolen.
"We don't want stolen merchandise," explained Mississippi Pawnbrokers Association President Kevin MacDonald. "And we lose money when we have something confiscated that was stolen."
That message is posted in plain sight at MacDonald's Momentum Pawn in Jackson. Despite that, MacDonald says it's a low percentage of stolen items that end up in pawn shops in the state. Every pawn shop in the state is required to report all their transactions to law enforcement.
"We report every night, our information is sent in nightly," said MacDonald.
That's because they're using an online system. But they're worried about the amount of personal information that's going straight to law enforcement."
"If you buy a product or if you make a loan on a product and that product has never been reported stolen, then there's no need to have that personal private information," noted MacDonald.
Ridgeland Police Lt. John Neal says they must have an item or suspect to search those nationwide databases.
"These property crimes may be time sensitive," described Neal. "The quicker we can get a hold of that stolen item and get it back to its rightful owner--certainly it's a benefit to law enforcement."
Before using the Leads Online database, it took extra time to complete the investigation if the items got taken a city over, to Jackson, for example.
"We would have to go down to the Jackson Police Department, manually thumb through all their pawn shop records to see if we could find that item," said Neal.
"Reporting online is the easiest thing in the world," said MacDonald. "It's just in retrospect, since we've realized the issues with reporting people's private information--that's the problem we have with it."
The bill has passed the House Ways and Means committee.
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