Lombard police using online auction to sell recovered items

When Lombard Police Department's property room used to fill up with jewelry, bicycles, CDs and other seized and recovered items, officers working overtime would set up for a live auction.

Once a year, or every other year, the public could bid on and buy whatever was available.

“We had a pretty good attendance on an annual basis. It was kind of a nice PR thing,” administrative Sgt. Jeff Jordan said Thursday.

But the days of the live auction are over as officers now are working with propertyroom.com, an online auction website that specializes in selling items collected by police departments.

“The reason we switched is there is no subscription or user fees,” Jordan said. “It's an online auction service that functions much like eBay.”

Lombard police officers will take photos of items they want to sell, and propertyroom.com will pick the items up monthly. The highest bidders receive their purchases from the website and never know which police department the items came from, propertyroom.com CEO PJ Bellomo said.

“The whole auctioning thing is not what (police departments) do for a living,” Bellomo said. “From the police chief point of view, we haul off your problems and we send back money.”

Lombard police will not be auctioning cars on propertyroom.com, but will use the service for all other items that are unclaimed or declared by a court as no longer needed for evidence.

Jordan said switching to online auctions will save the department money on overtime pay for officers who used to set up the auctions, which historically were held on weekends.

“The thing about evidence rooms or property rooms is you end up with a lot of stuff and you have to do something with it,” Jordan said. “At some point, you're going to run out of room if you don't.”

Itasca's Police Department also uses an online auction service, obenaufauctions.com, Chief Scott Heher said.

“It just removes any appearance of any impropriety,” Heher said. “It allows the public access to those items the police department recovers and can't return.”

While police departments in other communities, including Aurora, Arlington Heights, Carol Stream and Schaumburg, have agreements with propertyroom.com, some still run live auctions.

“We haven't utilized the online (auctions) yet, but I think we'll look at all options in the future,” Bloomingdale Chief Frank Giammarese said.

Lombard plans to have some items available for auction by January or February, Jordan said.