Vancouver police recover $50,000 in stolen goods

Hundreds of items were organized and labeled – everything from power tools to musical instruments, bicycles, golf clubs, televisions, watches and weapons (both legal and illegal). But these things weren’t part of a garage sale.

Vancouver, Washington, police recently recovered more than $50,000 worth of stolen property during an investigation into a string of property crimes, and they’re trying to match everything with the rightful owners.

The agency hasn’t had such a large-scale recovery in a long time. Typically, police recover a few items or a carload of stolen goods at a time.

“This is kind of a bigger case for us,” said Sgt. Steve Dobbs. He leads the neighborhood response team on the east side of the city, which deals with street-level crimes and livability issues.

On April 23, detectives served a search warrant on a storage unit in east Vancouver, where they seized stolen items, and later served additional warrants on a vehicle and residence, where they found more stolen property.

While the neighborhood response team usually moves quickly through cases, this particular case has consumed an estimated 352 staff hours so far because of the sheer volume of items involved. Dobbs will keep working with another detective to wrap up the case and identify property owners.

After announcing last week they had recovered all this property, the department was flooded with calls from people trying to retrieve belongings. Detectives and volunteers were still trying to evaluate and document each individual item.

So, for the first time, the agency set up a website and a phone number that leads people through the process of recovering their belongings. Police will get back to people starting Tuesday.

The goods filled two U-Haul trucks and two vans, Dobbs said. And yet, it just “scratches the surface” of the large amount of property stolen annually. Over $10 million worth of property was reported stolen to Vancouver police in 2013, according to the latest data from the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs. Most things are never recovered.