Wholesale conduits for stolen property, especially items stolen in burglaries -- that's one view of how pawnshops and second-hand-goods stores operate in Canada.
"There's definitely turn-a-blind-eye attitude everywhere," says Detective Sergeant Tom Dovgalev of the Ottawa police, who tries to track the retail flow of illegal merchandise in the nation's capital.
But that's not true, at least in the licensed pawnshop industry, responds Howard Green, proprietor of H. Williams & Co, a fixture for more than 50 years on downtown Toronto's pawnshop strip on Church Street.
"The majority of the people who walk through my door are legitimate people who have a need for short-term money and I have nothing to hide," Mr. Green says. He cites a "redemption rate" -- customers who subsequently retrieve their property, minus a fee -- of more than 95 per cent of the 30,000 transactions he does each year.
Still, changes are on the horizon for Ontario's century-old Pawnbrokers Act, to try to close the door to the sale of stolen goods.
Attorney General Michael Bryant, whose own Toronto home was burglarized 10 years ago, hopes to introduce draft legislation in the fall to overhaul the act. A loophole "allows the legal laundering of stolen goods through pawnbrokers and second-hand goods stores," Mr. Bryant said in an interview. "We want to close that."
On the face of things, changes proposed by the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police would do no more than streamline the reporting system that governs the sale or pawning of used goods.
The province's hundreds of pawnshops and second-hand stores are already required to ask customers for identification and to record pertinent details of the items being pawned. That's all done on paper and made available to police.
But in Ontario alone, there are millions of such transactions yearly and police don't have the time to plow through the mountains of data, said Det. Sgt. Dovgalev, who did much of the research for the OACP.
"You end up getting inundated with filing cabinets full of paper work."
So the proposal to be weighed by Mr. Bryant's office would move the procedure on-line, and Nova Scotia is moving in the same direction.
A Halifax committee that includes police and prosecutors recently urged creation of an electronic, Internet-based registry aimed at thwarting the sale of stolen goods -- in particular, computers, electronic equipment, TV sets, stereos, power tools, musical instruments and bicycles.
Many municipalities in Saskatchewan, Alberta and Ontario already use similar systems to track pawned property. Nationwide, Det. Sgt. Dovgalev estimates that 40 per cent of used-goods stores and pawnshops have adopted the concept.
The details are fed to Business Watch International of Regina, which supplies them to police upon request.
But for the most part it's done on a voluntary basis. That's what would change in Ontario under the OACP plan -- which would make electronic reporting mandatory.
Each year, more than 150,000 residential break-ins are reported to Canadian police, intrusions that commonly cause considerable trauma to victims. Less than one in five burglaries, however, is ever solved. And by every estimate, a sizable portion of the loot does end up behind the counters of used-goods outlets.
Back on Church Street, Mr. Green is not thrilled at the prospect of having to relay the expense -- anywhere from 50 cents to $2 per transaction -- to his customers, most of whom are already hard-pressed for cash and usually part with their goods for a fraction of what they're worth.
But what really bothers Mr. Green and fellow pawnbroker Chris Shortt, owner of the adjacent McTamney James & Co. pawnshop, is the human component of the proposed change: The fact that along with particulars of the pawned goods, store owners would have to record electronically the identification of all the customers who walk through their doors and do business.
That data, too, would automatically be forwarded to BWI, which uses computer software to sift through the information to find, for example, unusually frequent customers. Mr. Green sees that as a "huge, huge infringement on rights, an overstepping of bounds," that he fears would steer business away.
Ann Cavoukian, Ontario's information and privacy commissioner, shares those concerns. Far better, Ms. Cavoukian suggests, would be a two-tier reporting system.
By all means create a provincial on-line registry for retailed and pawned second-hand items that police in all jurisdictions could tap into to match against descriptions of stolen property, she says.
But unless a red flag goes up, the personal details of the customer who brought in the item should stay with the store and not be relayed to police, Ms. Cavoukian said in an interview.
"What I don't want is this to be a rote exercise . . . in this day and age of surveillance, and the ease with which information can be captured and routinely sent to law enforcement, we're trying to break that pattern. We don't want our society to morph into a surveillance society."
It's terrain already familiar to her office. In Oshawa, Ont., earlier this year, a court ruling upheld a city bylaw requiring second-hand-goods stores to relay customers' details -- including photographs and home addresses -- to police. The case, which pits the city against a branch of Cash Converters Canada Inc., is being appealed; intervenor status has been granted to the privacy commission, which backs the position of Cash Converters that supplying the data would be a serious breach of privacy rights.
Det. Sgt. Dovgalev says there's nothing particularly radical about automating the reporting system. The particulars about pawnshop customers are already available to police officers -- if they can find time to sift through the paper, which mostly they can't.
"We're looking for needles in haystacks right now," he says.
Where mandatory on-line reporting systems are in place, in cities such as Minneapolis, property recovery rates have improved through "a tool that can pick that haystack up and sift out the needles."