In December, 2003 the 18 member counties of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (COG) awarded BWI the contract to custom develop and implement a central, regional pawn data sharing system (RPDSS). See press release.

History:

A regional pawn system was needed to combat the proliferation and sales of stolen property in the DC region where property is often stolen in one county and pawned in another. Pawn units in law enforcement agencies are responsible for the collection, tracking, and management of pawned property data that is reported to their agency in the form of pawn transaction reports. These reports capture information on the individual pawning an item such as name, address, physical description and data on each item being pawned such as item type, make, model, serial number, and item description.

A wide variety of police records systems were used to capture pawn transaction report data throughout the region. In most jurisdictions reported data was manually entered into the agency’s records management system or into a stand-alone pawn application. In some cases the volume of paper reports received limited the ability of the unit to enter the data so the paper reports were filed and became paper archives. Only the District of Columbia and Prince George’s County made progress in the way of getting property dealers to report their information electronically, though their efforts were by no means complete. Due to the number of pawn shops, secondhand dealers, and other property dealers in the region, estimated to be over 700 transacting over 112,000 items a month, and due to the understaffed nature of pawn units, agencies have been experiencing difficulty keeping automated systems up-to-date with reported pawn data while keeping up with licensing, enforcement, and other activities such as supporting criminal investigations. A central, regional system was viewed as a way to consolidate reported data in a single, shared system, and to standardize the way pawn data is captured and stored.

The Solution:

The RPDSS is a world leading pawn data sharing system that facilitates the cross-jurisdictional sharing of information in a standardized format. The system is hosted at the University of Maryland’s “CAPWIN” data center and made available to all accredited police investigators in the region. A key value of the system is the standardization of the way pawned property is identified and described. Previously, this lack of standardization limited the ability to effectively search data between the different jurisdictions. Data standardization greatly simplifies investigations where detectives can determine patterns and individuals of interest, while identifying stolen property being pawned in each jurisdiction and throughout the region.

With this project, BWI is setting a new standard when it comes to internet-based crime prevention.

BWI was selected over 10 other respondents for the comprehensiveness of their hosted service and in recognition of BWI’s resident expertise in the pawn reporting and investigation technology space.

This project complemented BWI's portfolio of product options with a pawn reporting and investigation system designed to be sold outright so that it may housed within a police agency’s IT infrastructure.  Further, many of the system features offered on the BWI Hosted Service are also included in the RPDSS such as:

• Internet based system accessible via the web enabling cross jurisdictional data sharing
• Ability to receive data uploaded directly from various pawnshop point-of-sale programs
• Optimized data entry screens for both business and/or police clerical data entry
• Cross-referencing serial numbers against the NCIC stolen article files
• Property hold and seizures management/reports, property alerts, frequent pawner analysis, local stolen property records administration.