An 18-year-old Rochester Hills man was arrested and charged with home invasion after police utilized a new online system that helps law enforcement to identify and recover stolen property. The system called LeadsOnline, which the Courts Law Enforcement Management Information System (CLEMIS) began providing to its member agencies this past month, led detectives to a pawn shop where they were able to connect Peter Difranco with items stolen in a home invasion.
“Oakland County has a national reputation for using technology to improve services to residents, including law enforcement,” Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson said. “CLEMIS and LeadsOnline together will be a very powerful tool for our investigators.”
CLEMIS is a model law enforcement consortium for the rest of the nation, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Troy Police pulled over a car in which Difranco was a passenger. The vehicle contained a large amount of jewelry. Suspecting the jewelry may be stolen, Troy Police contacted Oakland County Sheriff’s Detective Howard Weir who was investigating some home invasions in Rochester Hills. Weir asked Auburn Hills Police to run DiFranco through LeadsOnline. Investigators determined Difranco had pawned several jewelry items at the Check N Gold on Rochester Road in Rochester Hills.
A few days later, Waterford Township Police contacted Detective Weir to advise him they had identified a guitar at one of their local pawn shops as having been stolen out of Rochester Hills. Difranco had pawned the guitar.
With the combined evidence discovered through LeadsOnline, DiFranco was arraigned earlier this month via video from the Oakland County Jail for a home invasion in the 1800 block of Ludgate Lane in Rochester Hills. 52-3 District Court Magistrate Marie Soma gave Difranco a $15,000 cash surety bond. He remains in custody at this time.
“CLEMIS continues to be an invaluable tool for our member law enforcement agencies,” said Novi Police Chief David Molloy, CLEMIS chairperson. “CLEMIS enables investigators to access a lot of law enforcement data in order to solve crimes more quickly and to identify trends.”
LeadsOnline also offers a free online service called ReportIt. Local residents can catalogue information about their valuables by setting up a free online account at reportit.leadsonline.com. If there is a break in, residents can print the information from any computer with internet access and give it to police. Having identifiable information about valuables readily available will help police track property if it is stolen or goes missing.
About CLEMIS
CLEMIS (www.oakgov.com/CLEMIS), managed by Oakland County under the leadership of Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson, provides technical solutions through a cooperative effort that are affordable and efficient for criminal justice and public safety agencies of all sizes. By serving as a technical link among multiple agencies, CLEMIS promotes communication and sharing of criminal justice information. CLEMIS had its beginning in the late 1960s. Since then, both its mission and technology have evolved through several upgrades to the next generation CLEMIS used today by about 100 southeast Michigan agencies which share information on the system and more than 200 public safety agencies which manage their administrative tasks. This crime information sharing and management consortium is among the largest of its kind in the United States.
About LeadsOnline
LeadsOnline (www.leadsonline.com) is the nation’s largest online investigative system used by more than 4,400 law enforcement agencies to recover stolen property and solve crimes. Each day, millions of items are added to the LeadsOnline database by businesses including secondhand stores, scrap metal recyclers, pawn shops, and Internet drop-off stores across all 50 states. Those records are instantly available to law enforcement agencies, meaning crimes can be solved in seconds, not months. The LeadsOnline system, compatible with the NCIC, serves as an indispensible, efficient, and money-saving resource for detectives because it provides a cross-jurisdictional, instantaneous, and accurate database that stops criminals from escaping detection by selling stolen items in another city. An official eBay partner, LeadsOnline helps prevent illegal transactions on the eBay website by giving law enforcement access to the world’s largest online marketplace through automatic upload of all eBay transactions into the LeadsOnline database. LeadsOnline also includes LeadsOnlabs, a system for tracking those involved in the illegal manufacture of methamphetamines; a Metal Theft Investigation System designed to track copper and other metal thefts; and cross-checks names of pawn customers against the OFAC SDN list of known terrorists and narcotics traffickers. Each year, LeadsOnline is credited with recovering millions of dollars in stolen goods and solving thousands of crimes that are often associated with bigger crimes, such as homicide, identity theft, and arson.
About Tom and Ann Gendich