Bill Would Extend Pawn Shop Wait Time
By Talia Buford; Journal Staff Writer
WEST WARWICK – A bill proposed by Rep. Patricia A. Serpa, D-West Warwick, Warwick, Coventry, would tighten the law that governs the sale of precious metals by pawn shops and extend a required wait time and participation in a statewide database to secondhand dealers as well.
The bill would increase the time pawn shops must wait before reselling jewelry, precious stones, coins and precious metals. Currently, shops must hold the items for one week. The bill would stretch that time to two weeks. It would also require secondhand dealers such as consignment shops to begin entering sale information to the Rhode Island Precious Metals & Pawn Database that is monitored by police officers for stolen goods.
“The police already do a great job given the current seven-day time frame,” said Serpa, a freshman representative from West Warwick. “By requiring pawn brokers to keep items in the database for 14 days, maybe even more families and individuals can have the relief of having their valuables returned.”
The system logs every piece of precious metal that has been brought to pawn shops across the state. When a precious metal is brought into a pawn shop, the owners must log a description of the item, the day it was sold, and the seller’s information into the database. For seven days, that information stays in the system and the item cannot be sold.
The police can search the site for a particular item, suspect or pawn shop, or can just scroll through the recent transactions, said West Warwick Police Detective Robert DiCarlo. If the police match an item with the description of an item reported stolen or missing, the pawn shop must hand it over to the authorities, DiCarlo said. However, if no police action is taken within that week, the pawn shop is able to resell the item or send it away to be melted down, he said.
“If it turns out to be stolen, the pawn shop takes a hit,” he said. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tracked something down only to call the pawn shop and have them tell me they just sent it out to be melted.”
The Web site is more advanced than the so-called GEMS system the police used during the 1990s.
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