Brooklyn Center Police Offer New System to Track Down Stolen Items
Stolen items could be tracked down faster thanks to a new software system the Brooklyn Center Police Department has.
“Report It” is a nationwide database that is free for Brooklyn Center residents. All you have to do is make an account and register up to 100 personal properties. If you want to add more than 100 items, there’s a contact on the “Report It” site. Residents can enter serial numbers, brand names and upload 4 photos for each item.
By documenting your valuables, if a theft would ever occur, you could make your property list available to your investigating officer. Police could enter information into a database that helps monitor stolen property. Anyone from secondhand dealers, pawnshops, gold buyers to pharmacies and scrap metal dealers can access the database and identify if a product is stolen.
“It would save us a bunch of time. The way we currently do it, if we go to take a report and you have a serial number and other identifying information, we’ll take that, but what we see a lot of times is people don’t have that information, so it makes it that much more difficult to recover the missing items,” explained Brooklyn Center Police Cmdr. Rick Gabler.
Information entered into the “Report It” database stays private. No one can access it, not even police. The information is password protected. It’s also protected by the same high-level security measures that are used by financial institutions and government agencies.
Gabler added that another benefit to using the new system is in the case of a house fire. Residents can print the list off immediately to their insurance. Officers encourage residents to log their products right away as they get it. Gabler said so far, he’s only aware of one other agency that is using the system.
The Brooklyn Center Police Department had been using a different system to try to locate stolen items, however that system is going away.
