Pawn shop sees few reported stolen items in 2015

Despite a decade-high amount of burglaries in Columbia, one pawn shop reported just a few flagged items by police as stolen.

Joe Swartz, manager at Tiger Pawn, said both Columbia police and the Boone County Sheriff’s Department called the store regarding eight stolen items sold to them in 2015. The Columbia Police Department dealt with more than 800 burglary cases that same year, the most its been in a decade, according to Uniform Crime Reporting numbers. While the proportion between the two numbers looks low, Swartz said law enforcement only spotted one item sold to them as stolen.

“We do lose out in the long run,” Swartz said of buying stolen items, unbeknownst to the store. “Because we’ve put out money buying something from somebody.”

When people bring items to Tiger Pawn to sell, Swartz said employees enter identifiable information into a software program called PawnMaster, which sends data like serial numbers to law enforcement. Those agencies then can search the serial numbers of reported stolen goods, and see if any pawn shop has purchased them. Swartz said the store also requires ID each time it buys something.

“If you were to sell me a stolen item, I wouldn’t know who you were,” Swartz said. “And I’ve got to be able to turn that over to CPD, or Boone County Sheriff, or whoever it may be that calls and says, ‘Hey I’ve got a stolen item hit in your store.'”

Police’s ability to find pawned items from burglary cases depends on knowing specific details, such as serial numbers or model types. However, not all common targets of theft carry such information, like jewelry or DVDs, Swartz said.

City councilman Michael Trapp said he’d be interested in seeing the city work further with pawn shops on curbing some burglaries. A director at Phoenix Health Programs, Trapp said many people struggling with drug addiction fall back to stealing, then pawning the items, to make money quickly and satisfy their habit. Trapp proposed a “cooling-off” period at pawn shops, where a store posts a picture of the item to a website, and the public can review items coming in. After a few days, the store could then offer the item to sell.

“People that are addicted to drugs want to get high right now,” Trapp said. “They don’t want to get high in three days.”

“Anything we can do to address criminality and address issues around drug addiction through a policy level, we need to consider that, and we need to consider that quickly,” Trapp said.

Columbia police public information officer Latisha Stroer said the department has drafted such an ordinance, but could not share details while the legal department reviewed it.

Swartz said a waiting period to hold goods before selling them would require a building twice the size they currently own.

“We really just want to see stolen items get back to their rightful owners,” Swartz said. “We don’t want to buy stolen items. It does nothing for our business at all. Some people have a bad light of what pawn shops really are. We’re just a resale business, just like anybody else. We buy used goods, we sell used goods.”