The property room at your local police station isn?t the first place you?d shop for an MP3 player, a laptop or a diamond engagement ring.
But Baltimore County and other police departments regularly fill their property rooms with various stolen, found or otherwise recovered items. They have to auction off what they can?t return to an owner. And they have PropertyRoom.com, their very own eBay, to do it.
“It might be evidence in a burglary case ? it was stolen from somebody,” said Tom Lane, founder and chairman of PropertyRoom.com, which he said auctions items from more than 600 departments in 40 states.
PropertyRoom.com workers pull up to the Baltimore County Police Department in Towson once a month and load up unclaimed items, police spokesman Bill Toohey said.
They drive it up to a warehouse in New York, Lane said, and give it the eBay treatment: They take pictures of the cameras and fix up the computers. Then they list on the Web site whatever they think can be auctioned.
The county gets a check for whatever was sold, Toohey said, and the money goes into a county general fund.
And if shoppers recognize VCRs or cell phones stolen from them a while back? If they can prove, perhaps with a serial number, that the item is theirs, they can have it, Lane said. “That?s happened lots of times,” he said.
