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Utah Pawn Shop Law Requiring Fingerprinting Threatens Other Secondhand Shops

By Christian Probasco, 1-28-11

Ken Sanders, owner of Ken Sander's Rare Books, says he doesn't want to collect sellers' thumbprints for a state database.

Owners of secondhand bookshops, used CD stores and antique shops in Utah say a board of pawnshop owners and law enforcement officials has been trying to use the state legislature to drive them out of business, and they’re sick of it.

“They want to make it so that any dealer of secondhand goods would have to obey the same draconian laws as pawnshops,” says Ken Sanders, owner of Ken Sander’s Rare Books, a prominent used bookstore in downtown Salt Lake City. “That would put me and a lot of other people out of business.”

“They” are the Pawn Shop and Second Hand Merchandise Advisory Board, which has been advocating for expansion of Utah’s Pawnshop and Secondhand Merchandise Transmission Information Act since it was passed in 2005.

The board includes representatives from the Utah Chiefs of Police Association, the Utah Sheriff’s Association, the Statewide Association of Prosecutors, three pawnshop owners, a used game store owner, a jewelry collector and a used record store owner.

The secondhand merchandise act required pawn shops, and then jewelry stores and coin dealers and most recently, used record and CD shops, to fingerprint every individual who sells them any used merchandise, then catalog each item, down to each earring and compact disc, and then enter information into the state’s pawn shop database every day.

Each violation of the act—every fingerprint or item not recorded and uploaded on a daily basis—could result in a $500 fine. The act exempts items sold on eBay, Craigslist and other electronic forums.

According to Mike Katsanevas, a representative of the pawn industry on the board, the act’s purpose is to cut down on property crimes, about 90 percent of which, he says, are drug related. Addicts who “punch in a car window” to steal CDs, radios and other valuable items, he says, will usually take them to nearby businesses to get quick cash for a fix.

He discounts the idea that criminals would make the effort to sell merchandise online.

“They want the money right now,” he says. “They don’t have any patience.”

Katsanevas points out that his board does not have the authority to enact law, only advise the legislature. He says he’s unconvinced that forcing buyers to put their seller’s fingerprints on file might dissuade some of them from doing business at local shops.

“Pawn shops have been taking prints for years,” he says.

But that doesn’t mean other businesses should be forced to take them, says Tom Stinson, a manager at Randy’s Records in Salt Lake City, which has been required to fingerprint sellers and upload every CD they buy every 24 hours since Jan. 1.

“The fingerprint (requirement) offends people,” he says. “They ask, ‘What am I, a criminal?’”

Stinson says the store hasn’t logged any “police issues” for about five years and doesn’t expect to see many new cases solved with the fingerprinting requirement.

“We’re not like a pawn shop where people sell $500 guitars or guns,” he says. “We usually buy $5 to $10 of CDs or records at a time.”

Dustin Hansen, retail manager and part owner of Graywhale CD in cities throughout the Wasatch Front, says the requirements are onerous even for chain stores.

“The legislature doesn’t see the logistics,” he says. “We have seven stores taking in maybe 15 to 30 items a day each. Our customers already have a trade card with their name and address. We already have to grade and price each item. We already have to hold the merchandise for 10 days. Now we have to enter the information about each item—including a serial number if there is one—and the customer’s fingerprint into a database every night.”

Hansen says the data entry requirements could easily add up to an uncompensated 40 hours of work per week, or another full-time position. And he laughs at the idea that the new requirements will deter criminals any more than it will hurt small operations, perhaps to the point of driving them out of business.

“The percentage of people who bring stolen CDs into our store is tiny,” Hansen says. “Years ago, when CDs and DVDs were worth something, you might have been able to make some money selling them secondhand.”

These days, most used CDs are worth a dollar each on trade, or 60 cents in cash at his stores.

Sanders and owners of secondhand shops believe the pawn shop board would like to apply the same standards to their businesses as they have to used CD stores. And they believe some people in the legislature are sympathetic to their cause.

House Speaker Becky Lockhart (R-Provo), one of the act’s sponsors, has said she won’t be allowing exemptions for other businesses like used clothing stores, bookstores and antique shops expire this session (Lockhart did not return numerous calls from New West). However, secondhand shop owners say that’s because they have been fighting to keep them included.

“They try to drop the exemptions for antique dealers and consignment shops every year,” says Dennis Barker, an antique dealer and publisher of the antique newsletter New Century Collector. “That makes it very difficult to make decisions, because if we had this law imposed on us, we would have to operate under a completely different business model.”

Penny McLaughlin, owner of Gingerbread Antiques in Sandy and Chairperson of the Utah Antique Dealers Association, agrees. “They want anyone who sells secondhand goods to obey the same rules as pawn shops. The only reason antique dealers remain exempted is because we hired a lobbyist to make our case.”

McLaughlin says she is “all for stopping crime,” but many, if not most of the antique businesses in Utah are “one-man operations,” which could not afford to document and upload a description of every item that comes into their shops, much less keep detailed records of their sellers.

“It’s not unusual for dealers to take in a hundred pieces of costume jewelry in one sale,” she says. “Can you imagine if we had to submit records for everything we bought?”

What’s more, she says, she and others would surely lose sellers if they were required to take fingerprints. “Ninety-nine percent of the time, I buy from older couples in their houses,” she says. “They’re downsizing to a smaller home and they want to get rid of some of their possessions.”

She doubts that most people she deals with would want to be fingerprinted, especially in their homes. She’s also frustrated that antique dealers aren’t represented on the board.

And she thinks Katsanevas is only telling part of the story when he says his board merely advises the legislature.

“The pawn shop industry in Utah has powerful lobbyists representing their interests,” she says.

Sanders, a former “book detective” who helped collar several book thieves as security chairman of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (and who was featured in Allison Hoover Bartlett’s book, The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession ) is also disturbed that the board would be tapped to make policy for his business, and that he should have to fight a lobbying battle to keep the status quo.

Sanders believes the board’s pawn shop owners have more sinister motivations than crime fighting for trying to impose their rules on every secondhand business in the state.

“They have a vested interest, a personal interest in parity for all secondhand shops,” he says. “Their intent is to put other secondhand dealers out of business.”

And they have a very different clientele than Sanders’.

“Pawnbrokers prey on human misery,” he says. “They are also money lenders. I don’t buy and sell guns or electronics and I don’t lend out money. I buy and sell books.”

Sanders often buys from prominent Utah families who would never consent to having their names entered into a database, much less being fingerprinted. On the other end of the spectrum, he sometimes buys collections of thousands of books from estates.

“I’ve bought 8,000 books in the last month alone,” he says. “It wouldn’t be worth it to catalog every one of them.”

Sanders says he doesn’t think it would be feasible to get the law repealed at this point, though Lockhart did raise that possibility a few years ago. What he wants is some assurance that bookstores will never lose their exemptions.

“We cannot possibly fight this year after year,” he says. 

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