Protect Your Valuables

Submitted by the Portsmouth Police Department:

The Portsmouth Police Department’s Problem Oriented Policing Detective Duane Jacques in partnership with the Portsmouth Library has launched a new program to better assist Portsmouth residents with protecting their property.  The Department is now encouraging residents to engrave on the back of their valuables their New Hampshire driver’s license number. Officers then coming into contact with a piece of property may then determine the potential owner by running the license number through the NH DMV.

The NH Department of Motor Vehicle’s data base is a large and sophisticated data base that is updated regularly when people move to new housing. While people’s locations and personal information like phone numbers, etc. may change, their license number remains the same. Tapping into existing resources like the NH DMV, rather than trying to duplicate a large searchable data base is the goal with this new program.

The Department has obtained two engravers that are now available free of charge through the public library. The devices may be checked out just as if someone were checking out a book. Our goal is provide residents an additional opportunity to mark their high value belongings in a way that will be searchable and lead to locating the rightful owner years from now if the items are lost or stolen.

Problem Oriented Policing is a criminal justice theory that focuses on evaluating incidents or crimes to determine their underlying causes and to attack those causes or contributing factors pro-actively. Our goal in Portsmouth is to apply the philosophy of Problem Oriented Policing throughout our agencies response to crime, disorder and to include the often difficult to quantify, “quality of life issues.” The way in which we hope to accomplish this is through building off of our existing community partnerships and creating new partnerships.