Oklahoma Law Enforcement Agencies Have A New Crime Fighting Tool

Oklahoma City Police are now using a new tool to solve crimes. OCPD is just one of 50 agencies in the state that now have access to a national database called Leads Online.

The database is already generating new leads on unsolved cases. Leads Online is a database of pawnshop transactions in Oklahoma and all over the country that can help with property crimes, homicides and missing persons cases.

Mitch Plumlee owns two of the 89 pawn shops in Oklahoma City.

"I've been doing this for about 22 years and it's always been the same," said Plumlee.

Plumlee has always been required to report daily transactions to police and police would manually enter those transactions into their own records.

With Leads Online, he now he shares that information electronically rather than paper tickets.

"It's easier, it saves me postage from having to mail them in," said Plumlee. "I used to have to save a copy from the transaction, I'd put them in an envelope and mail it out every morning."

Deputy Chief Johnny Kuhlman said Oklahoma City Police just rolled out the $50,000 a year tool to the entire department.

"This is just exciting for us because it's new technology," said Deputy Chief Kuhlman.

Until now, OCPD could only track OKC pawn shops and had no way of checking other cities' pawnshops.

"Somebody can steal something in Midwest City and pawn it in Oklahoma City and a burglar doesn't care where a city line is, or vice versa, steal it in Oklahoma City and pawn in Midwest City, Del City, Norman, or Edmond and now we're hooked into all of those," said Kuhlman.

Besides burglaries or larcenies, Leads Online can also help in the search for suspects.

"One of the detectives was looking for a woman involved in a child death, dropped off the face of the earth and she couldn't find her," said Kuhlman. "Entered her name and found out she had been pawning things in Midwest City."

"We had a missing person out of Oklahoma City, entered her name in this and found out she had pawned a gun in eastern Oklahoma and she was ultimately found in Arkansas," Kuhlman said.

Leads Online also allows citizens to register serial numbers for personal items. The database securely stores those serial numbers in case anything happened to your belongings in the future.

Click here for the website or click here for the citizen's feature.