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Prince Albert Police go online with stolen property

Jun 7, 2013 | 5:16 PM

Prince Albert Police Service (PAPS) have unveiled a new way to reclaim stolen or lost items.

When property is recovered from an investigation, officers will now be posting photos along with a detailed description of how the items were found in their ‘News/Info’ section of the PAPS website.

“It’s something that we’ve talked about for several months, getting it up and we might as well utilize our website for it,” said Sgt. Kelly McLean. “We’re anticipating that the public will be very interested in a lot of this stuff, and we’ll have a lot of hits to our website.”

Mclean said that originally there was no way to advertise the found items to the public and therefore they would either be destroyed or put up for public auction.

The postings will remain on the site for 90 days or until the owner has reclaimed their property.

After this the item in question will be either put up for public auction or destroyed.

Items will only be posted that are considered valuable which will be determined by the investigators on a case by case basis.

“We needed to set the criteria for when we were going to use officers with their names and our switchboard number in order to contact specific officers,” said McLean. “So it’s a difference between found property and investigative issues.”

He said that found property will be the responsibility of the property manager at the station who can be contacted on during a small window of the day, and property that was part of an ongoing investigation would require the owner to contact the officer who is investigating.

McLean said that if someone claims ownership of one of the advertised items, the property manager or officer in charge of the item will ask the possible owner to list off identifying marks and properties of the item that are not listed on the site.

He added if the item has no identifiable markings that can be distinguished by a specific owner they will not list it on the site.

An RSS feed is also available so anyone who believes their property has been stolen can be updated on a 24 hour basis.

You can check out the listing of items now on the PAPS site.

jbowler@panow.com

On Twitter: @journalistjim