Pawn Information Exchange System Project (PIES)

Through funding from the US Department of Justice’s (USDOJ) National Institute of Justice (NIJ), the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center—Southeast Region (NLECTC-SE) will follow-up the successful South Carolina Information Exchange (SCIEx) statewide law enforcement information sharing system by initiating a statewide Pawnshop Information Exchange System (PIES) project.

This initiative will incorporate many of the features of the SCIEx model utilized by law enforcement agencies in South Carolina, using open source architecture and the Law Enforcement Automated Data Replicator (LEADR) software. LEADR software allows for a central database to accept information from disparate law enforcement agencies and establish real-time information sharing and access between law enforcement agencies.

The goal of the statewide PIES is to allow law enforcement agencies to know about pawn shop transactions statewide. It is a known fact that the criminal element may travel from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and in many cases, county to county and beyond to conduct criminal activity - including the selling of stolen property. Agencies that use an automated PIES system locally have had success in solving criminal offenses and recovering property. Bridging the gap between current disparate local and regional systems will allow law enforcement agencies a better chance to increase the rate of solving property and other crimes, as well as recovering stolen property.

The system planned will incorporate a series of alerts including for identified stolen property transactions and, unusual or threshold levels of specific activity, such as an individual who makes more than a normal amount of transactions (i.e., a threshold number of transactions in a period of time) or selling/pawning a specific type of property (i.e., 5 televisions in a period of time) to different pawn shops. These alerts will be sent electronically by email or other means to notify specific investigators, or general alerts sent to all participants of specific identified activities.