Gainesville to adjust pawn shop regs

GAINESVILLE – Gainesville Police Chief Brian Kelly brought before the City Council at Thursday’s work session a city ordinance amendment that he feels will better help in the recovery of stolen property - namely, those items that frequently end up in area pawn shops and secondhand dealers.

"We’re here this morning to present an ordinance that the City Attorney, the City Marshall, myself, and several members of our offices have been working on for quite some time regarding pawnbrokers and secondhand dealers…we have all come to a consensus…to aid and assist in the recovery of stolen property," Kelly told the Council.

"It will deal with everything from licensing of the pawn shop businesses, permitting of employees, as well as enacting of an electronic automated data base," Kelly added.

"Anytime a transaction occurs the pawn shop will be required to take certain information from the individual pawning it, photographs, identification, fingerprints…as well as pictures of the items pawned," Kelly continued.

"The benefit to the Police Department," Kelly said, "is anytime we’re dealing with stolen property we’ll be able to search this data base. It’ll be linked to other pawn shops throughout the state, the nation."

And the cost to the city for each transaction? "About 20-cents per transaction. (And) the company we are looking at will provide the camera and the fingerprint scanner (to each pawn shop and secondhand dealer)," Kelly responded.

Mayor Danny Dunagan liked the idea of joining numerous other municipalities in using such technology.

"The last thing we want to do is make it too easy for the crooks to sell their merchandise," Dunagan commented.

Doug Herrin, District Manager for TMX Finance, the parent company of auto title brokers TitleMax, TitleBucks, EquityAuto Loan & InstaLoan, was in attendance and agreed.

"We don’t want to do ‘bad’ business," Herrin said.

The ordinance will be voted on Tuesday, November 6th.