and as a crime prevention tip for for the citizens is when you have your jewelry and your items in your house you need to have very descriptive documentation of the items that you have in your house another great idea for jewelry and stuff is to protect yourself and to help the police departments get you your property back during investigations like this is if you take pictures of your jewelry that are fairly close up so we can you can see and we can see when if something happens to you exactly what the jewelry is or exactly what the item is if it's stolen from you then you can provide that in those pictures to the police departments which will help us during the investigations when we have recoveries of property similar to this we're here today for a press conference regarding an operation that the milwaukee police department district number two has conducted over the last month during recent investigations we learned information that there were numerous stores at least on the south side of milwaukee who are purchasing gold and precious gem items from citizens without following the respective city ordinances and state as it relates to precious gem purchases these stores are required by state law and city ordinance to identify the seller of the item when people when citizens come in to sell items they're also required to document the sale on a form that is provided by the milwaukee police department in addition to that they are required to maintain a log that is legible for one a one year period after the purchase of the items and also they need they are required to get declaration of ownership from from the seller all the items that they're purchasing when after receiving this information the milwaukee police department conducted an undercover operation at four locations within district number two during this operation the four locations purchased items from the undercover officer in violation of all four of the ordinances statutes that i just mentioned after these purchases were made the milwaukee police department obtained search warrants for these four stores and we executed the first the four search warrants during the week of um or during last week while at these four locations we discovered that all four of these locations were purchasing items in violations of the ordinances and statutes that i had mentioned the transactions for for the last 15 days and the transactions that they conducted during the last 15 days the items that they took in illegally are were confiscated and are now in the custody milwaukee police department um we have several items which we've already connected to crimes uh within the city of milwaukee and we believe also other these items may have been related to crimes outside of the city of milwaukee we have one victim here today who we were able to recover one of her rings which was taken during an incident that she was involved in the four locations that were search warrants were conducted were reflections jewelry at 1306 west forest home cash and gold at 1214 south cesar chavez john's jewelry at 1119 west mitchell and starred jewelry at 1212 west lincoln uh in the next starting today we're going to be working with the surrounding jurisdictions with us to try and identify other items that were taken or taken during crimes in our jurisdiction as well as the surrounding suburbs next week on tuesday wednesday and thursday after you you air this press conference we are going to allow citizens who believe some of these items may be taken from incidents that they have reported to either the milwaukee police department or other jurisdictions an opportunity to claim their property we will assist them in trying to identify it what we would ask and what we are going to require we are going to give you a phone number uh the phone number is 235-6633 there'll be a message on there what information they should provide and what information they're going to have to bring with them on on tuesday wednesday and thursday of next week to district number two in order to try and recover their property that phone number will be up and running within probably a half hour of this press conference so they can just wait that half hour what if their incident occurred outside of the city of milwaukee what we are going to require them to do is they are going to have to contact the outside jurisdiction and bring a copy of the incident report describing the items that were taken from their crime with them to the to our department so we can see the report and have proof that the incident occurred um we believe most of this jewelry was probably taken that wasn't that something between october 1st and november 24th of this year as part of this investigation we have issued 85 citations to the four locations where the search warrants were conducted which is a total of over forty forty thousand dollars in fines and we believe that the weight of the gold that you have in front of you the meltdown weight is valued at approximately seventy to seventy five thousand dollars i believe that this is a problem that these um stores are contributing to the ease of burglary or crime suspects to get rid of their stolen property and make a profit from stealing items from the good citizens in our city in the surrounding jurisdictions the ones that we've recovered so far it appears that it's going to be from homes at this time we're not sure obviously as we go here there's 1200 items we're trying to identify i truly believe that some of these may be from muggings and stuff for robberies but that will be more to come out on that as we as we move along here identifying the items to the victims we know we have numerous class rings or several class rings we're actually working with a business that gives rings as part of their uh promotion of their employees when they have five and ten years on a job as well as a school in the in the city where a couple class rings are taken that we're trying to identify the owners and where they're taken from we have a ring that's actually it has turtles on it two which is a turtle inside a turtle which is very unique with a matching bracelet and also there's believe it or not there's actually as they call them gold grills that people wearing on their teeth that are also laying here that you'll you'll have on your video