The Regional Pawn Database Sharing System (RPDSS) has been developed to serve the Washington metropolitan area. Nineteen local law enforcement agencies in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia are sharing pawn transaction data through the Web enabled project. The project was developed using grant funds made available in the COPS Technology Grant #2002CKWX0044.
The new regional system provides investigators with all the tools they could imagine. This is because the features of the custom system are based on ‘wish lists’ that were compiled during regional meetings of investigators over a period of more than five years.
In addition to the routine documenting, tracking and querying of pawn transactions, robust investigative features have been incorporated into the system. Among these features is the ability to automatically link individuals who reside at the same address, share a common phone number or who are otherwise associated.
Another feature of the system alerts investigators via their cell phone or pager when a person of interest conducts a pawn transaction or when a piece of property is pawned. Investigators can also set alerts based on accumulated dollar amounts or frequency of transactions within a set period of time.
The system checks every serial number of pawned items against the NCIC database. The design is unique because it uses an extract of the NCIC stolen article files to conduct the query in-house rather than routing a query of each serial number to NCIC. Using this method the serial numbers can be rerun an unlimited number of times without impacting NLETS or NCIC.
Because the system is Web based investigators with the proper authentication can access the data from any computer with Internet access.
The system was rolled out in August 2004. Within the first six months of operation the system resulted in 1320 arrests and the recovery of more than four-million dollars of stolen property. An independent evaluation of the system by the University of Virginia Tech concluded that 450 cases that would have otherwise gone unsolved were closed as a result of the regional system.
www.iacptechnology.org/LEIM/2006TechAwardWinners.htm
http://www.bwipolice.com/Products/RegionalPawnDataSharingSystemRPDSS/Introduction/tabid/105/Default.aspx | 
