Fort Lauderdale has the third worst property crime rate in the nation and has more pawnshops than it does McDonald's. Is there a link? Police have been saying "yes" for years. We decided to check it out for ourselves.
Beat the clock
In July, the Sun-Sentinel made a request under Florida's Sunshine Law for every pawn slip generated in the city in 1995. (Our request beat a change in state law in October that specifically exempted the forms from public view.)
There were nearly 70,000. About 32,000 had been entered into the police department's computer; another 38,000 had not.
We hired temporary workers to enter the paper records into our own PCs. Then we merged the two databases and loaded them into the computer program Paradox.
The result was a gold mine of information: the names, addresses and birth dates of everyone who had pawned anything in 1995. The slips, required to be filled out by pawnbrokers then sent to the police, also included detailed descriptions of the items pawned.
Criminal dealings?
The first thing we did was rank the pawners by their number of trips to the pawnshop. Then we used local and state databases to check the criminal records of the top 50.
The result: Thirty-nine out of 50 had criminal arrest records; 19 for burglary, theft or other related offense; 14 others faced drugs charges, almost all of them for cocaine. The remaining five faced a hodgepodge of charges.
But we let the pawners' activities speak for themselves.
Is something amiss when a 21-year-old convicted burglar goes to the pawnshop 66 times in one year, pawning, among many other things, 12 bikes, 14 beepers, five car stereos four portable stereos, two VCRs and eight rings?
What about a man with a laundry list of drug and theft charges on his rap sheet who went to the pawnshop 64 times in 1995, pawning seven TVs, eight VCRs, four portable stereos and two home stereos?
We let readers decide. Judging from the hundreds of calls, letters, faxes and e-mails that we - and more importantly, state legislators received in response to our series, it seemed certain that readers were angry at what they had read. The state senator who sponsored a new law governing pawnshops has already filed a bill that will tighten restrictions on the industry.
Banks for the poor
Finding bad guys was not the only use for our database. We also wrote a story about frequent pawners who were not suspected of anything criminal, but were caught up in a cycle. That story, which included anecdotes about a man who made 153 trips to the pawnshop in a single year, focused on the role of pawnshops as "banks for the poor."
As best we can tell, this project is unique. Nowhere, including in the IRE morgue and NICAR database library, could we find an investigative story based on pawn slips.
Duplicating the project
If you're interested in conducting an investigation similar to ours, step one is to determine whether pawn slips are kept in your city and, if so, whether they are public record.
Since the document is little known, chances are reporters haven't asked to inspect them. Go in assuming you have the right to. We didn't know whether our request would be granted and were prepared to get the lawyers involved if it wasn't. One argument we would have made is that pawn slips are provided by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and by law are forwarded to local police departments, hence they are public.
We don't know if that argument would have worked, but it's probably worth trying under similar circumstances.
If your police department does keep pawn slips and agrees to turn them over, make sure to ask if they are available electronically. It'll save you a lot of work. Happy hunting. Scott Glover can be reached at (954) 356-4523.