Tough pawn-reporting law studied
More than a half-dozen customers browsed in the Pawn 1 Inc. store on Sprague Avenue Friday morning. They weaved between saddles and snowboards and skis and paused to watch a few minutes of basketball on a TV for sale for $299.95.
Tony Barbee, the store’s manager, said he wants to make sure the people he sells to are honest and those he buys from aren’t criminals. That’s why he supports an ordinance the Spokane Valley City Council is considering that likely would give the city the toughest pawn-reporting law around.
“It’ll stop more thieves,” Barbee said.
Most local jurisdictions, including Spokane, Spokane County, Post Falls and Coeur d’Alene, require pawnbrokers to report on paper to law enforcement departments the identity of people who pawn items and the goods they buy. That information is entered into respective databases so that victims of theft can more easily identify property that was taken from their homes to the pawn shops.
Spokane Valley’s proposed ordinance goes a step further by requiring that pawn brokers photocopy the sellers’ identification and then report the items electronically, not on paper. Electronic reporting, via the Internet or on a disk, cuts down on the time it takes for officers or volunteers to manually record the information.
“This is not about making it difficult for the people in the pawn business,” Spokane Valley Police Chief Cal Walker said. “It’s to make sure we have accurate information, and that we can find (stolen property) and get it back to the rightful owner.”
Ron Anderson, manager of Shamrock Pawn Shop, likes the idea of clamping down on pawn reporting. He estimates that 1 percent of the items he sells were stolen by those who brought them to his shop.
“I just think that being strict is good,” Anderson said. “I think it’s more honest business.”
Mayor Diana Wilhite said she wants to give police another tool to crack down on crime, but said she must balance that with the added cost to business owners.
“I don’t know what the happy medium is,” Wilhite said.
Pawnbrokers save money when they don’t deal with criminals, though, said Jeremy Jones, a salesman at Shamrock. If a pawn shop pays for an item and later learns it was stolen, the business eats the cost when it has to hand the property over to police.
Walker said strict reporting in Spokane Valley could prompt criminals to take their stolen goods outside the city.
“A lot of times what we do is squeeze the tube of toothpaste,” only pushing the bad element to another area, he said. But “if you make it difficult, sometimes people will choose not to actually perpetrate the crime.”
Walker and Wilhite want the local jurisdictions to work together on the problem to curb the toothpaste effect.
“The criminal is always going to find the easiest place to dump stuff,” Wilhite said. “That’s why it’s important to work across the boundaries.”
Some collaboration is already at work, said Anderson of Shamrock Pawn. A man who stole paint pumps from his boss in Coeur d’Alene recently sold one each to five different stores in the Spokane area. Although Spokane County’s database isn’t connected to any in Idaho, a Coeur d’Alene detective asked Spokane County deputies for help. They ran the employee’s name in the pawn database, and the thief’s tracks were uncovered in an instant, Anderson said.