Navajo County pawn regulations aimed at stolen items

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The Navajo County Board of Supervisors has enacted new regulations that officials say will make it harder for people to sell items that they acquired through burglaries on the Navajo Reservation.

"The goal of the program," said Navajo County Sheriff K.C. Clark, "is to get stolen property back to its rightful owner. We have a responsibility to ensure that thieves and criminals do not have an easy way to profit from their crime."

There are no figures to show whether off-reservation pawn shops in Navajo County are being used as fences for stolen property from reservation burglaries. Law enforcement officials think it happens often.

Pawn dealers, however, question this belief, saying that the new regulations will adversely affect their Navajo clients who come to them to raise enough cash to get back to the reservation.

The program approved by the board will allow Clark to levy a fee of up to $3 on every pawn transaction. The revenue from this fee will allow the sheriff's department to hire a full-time deputy just to oversee pawn activities in the county and set up programs which will make it easier to determine of items being pawned were stolen.

It will also require pawn dealers to take a photo of everyone who comes in to pawn an item and as well as of the item itself.

"The photos will provide the sheriff's office with a visual record of the item pawned and the person pawning it," said Clark, "allowing for more rapid and efficient identification of stolen items and prosecution of individuals pawning them."

He said the current system doesn't work.

Since there is no one person responsible for dealing with pawn shops, each of the county deputies has a role, checking with pawn shops every time they get a burglary report. The deputies also go around every week or two and pick up pawn slips to check them against lists of stolen items.

But that's where the system breaks down because those slips are put in shoe boxes and just sit around for weeks and sometimes months because no one has the time to go through them, said Clark.

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Pawn dealers complain

When the board held public hearings on the proposal in late 2009, several pawn dealers complained loud and long about the program, saying it would do more harm than good.

Harley Turley, who owns Arizona Pawnman in Holbrook, was not one of those who appeared before the board because he found out about the meeting after the fact but his complaints echo many of the same concerns expressed by other pawn dealers.

His main complaint was about the $3 fee, pointing out the majority of his transactions were for between $10 and $20.

"So they are saying that I loan someone $10 to buy gas and a gallon of milk and then I have to take $3 back and the person will have to forget about buying that milk," he said.

About 80 percent of his customers, he said, are Navajo and about 77 percent of the items that are pawned are eventually redeemed.

Clark disagreed that the $3 fee would be a burden. He argued that most of the people who go to pawn shops are trying to raise money not for milk but for liquor so reducing the amount they have available to buy beer or wine will help to alleviate the community's alcohol abuse program.

He also pointed out that the pawn dealers charge a $5 upfront fee for every transaction and the state allows them to charge this every time the item is pawned while the new program will impose that fee only once.

He said that if it turns out that the fee brings in too much money, he would have no problem reducing it to $2.75 or $2.50.

"We decided to go to $3 in the beginning rather than $2 because we knew there would be a fight," he said.

If the department started at $2 and then realized it needed more money and raised the fee, it would result in another fight with pawn dealers. This way, if the amount was lowered, the department would be looking at only one fight.

Turley questioned whether there was a need for the program since he doubts that people are trying to sell items at pawn shops that they stole from homes in Holbrook or on the reservation.

He said he has a friend who operates a pawn shop out of his home in Joseph City and has been doing it for 30 years and has had only two items confiscated by police over that period.

Police come to his place every week or two, he said, and in the past three years only found three items had been stolen.

Pawn dealers 'careful'

Despite what people see in the movies or on television, pawn dealers are very careful, he said, about what kinds of items they provide loans for because they know if the item was stolen, police will confiscate it and they will be out of the money they loaned.

"If some young dude comes in and tried to pawn a 100-year-old squash blossom necklace, it ain't going to happen," He said.

He also pointed out that he already takes a photo of everyone who pawns an item, not to be safe in case the item is stolen, but to use when the person comes back to redeem it so he's sure that it's the same person.

As for what happens to all of those computers, televisions and guns that are stolen during burglaries, Turley said the answer is simple. People sell them on eBay or Craigslist and there is no way the police can catch them.

Clark said he questioned Turley's statements about the items being sold on the Internet but said he plans to use some of the money that is raised to purchase a software program that allows police to track stolen items, even if they are sold on the Internet.

 Turley said if the police want to do something that will help pawn dealers, all they have to do is set up a procedure whereby they would e-mail pawn dealers on a daily basis a list of items that have been reported stolen. This would allow pawn dealers to be on the outlook for these items.

"I have been suggesting this for a long time but no one has done it," he said.

Clark agreed that would help and said that in the past, the police department didn't have the time to do this but they would once they have a pawn officer.

He also said that this program has been put in place in other communities, such as Flagstaff Phoenix, Kingman and Mesa, and in each case it has helped police capture people responsible for burglaries.

After Flagstaff enacted the program, he said, the department was successful in recovering $35,000 in stolen property and because of the information that was collected was able to solve a homicide.

The plans are to start imposing the fee within the next few weeks.

The board of supervisors, he said, have asked for a report on the program after its first year to decide whether it should be continued or changed to make it more effective.

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