Subject:
Title
Ordinance amending and re-enacting Section 16-10-7; Pawnbrokers, junk dealers, etc.
body
Presented By: City Attorney Brown
Recommendation and Review
Over the last several years, the Harrisonburg Police Department has seen an increase in the amount of pawn shops, precious metals, and scrap dealers, and the amount of items being passed through these respective businesses. Many times over the past years, HPD has conducted investigations in which these stores are used to pass stolen goods. This presents a challenge to law enforcement in the aspect of attempting to quickly track down stolen items. Under the current City Code, pawn dealers and like businesses are required to report all items taken in to their business to the police department within a 24 hour period of them taking possession of an item. Until recently, these items were reported on a facsimile sheet or spread sheet which would be emailed to the records unit. This created massive piles of paper that had no categorization to it and made attempting to locate stolen/pawned items almost impossible.
In July of 2013, the Harrisonburg Police Department purchased an online pawn reporting program (Leads Online) that has greatly increased the efficiency of the Harrisonburg Police Department and has cut down on the amount of work required by pawn dealer and like businesses. It is the intent of HPD to try and update and modify our City ordinance to now require all pawn dealers and like business to be mandated to use this online reporting program. This will expedite us learning about items that are stolen within our local pawn and like businesses. In addition, this program maintains a searchable database that can be accessed years later if needed to look for stolen property that may have been pawned. Most local pawn dealers are currently using this program, but are not currently required to by code. Our current ordinance, does also not specifically address any required reporti...
Click here for full text