"STORES FIND THEMSELVES ASKING EMPLOYEES IN SOME STATES TO COLLECT FINGERPRINTS, PHOTOS AND PHYSICAL DESCRIPTIONS

Secondhand Goods laws can be created at the city, county or state level. Currently Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Hawaii, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Nevada, Ohio, Utah and Washington state include video games as items that need to be tracked and reported to police. Many counties and municipalities also have secondhand goods ordinances that apply to purchases of used video games. That means that stores like Best Buy, Target, Play N Trade and GameStop now find themselves asking employees in some states to collect a variety of information on their customers including fingerprints, photos and physical descriptions. That information is then entered into a database shared with local law enforcement.

Sean Bersell, vice president of public affairs for the Entertainment Merchants Association, says it can create a difficult situation for merchants, but it also can help cut down on shoplifting. So while the association doesn't oppose the laws, it does work to try and keep them very narrowly focused.

It's a tough balancing act that leads to the association spending a lot of time dealing with laws it believes ask too much of merchants.

"There are several things going on," Bersell said. "A general concern about stolen goods both from residential burglaries and shoplifting has been around for a long time. Some of these laws have covered everything, including video games, since video games have been around."

Like pawn shop laws, secondhand goods laws were created to cut down on the resale of stolen goods and help law enforcement track criminals. Since their creation, many of these laws have been expanded to include an increasingly diverse selection of goods. These laws also require that items purchased from customers be tracked and reported to local law enforcement, but according to Bersell over the past ten years or so there has been a slow updating of state laws to specifically add video games to the list of items that need to be tracked. That's partly because video games are becoming an increasingly popular item among thieves and burglars.

"Law enforcement is drawing the connection between residential burglaries and drug abuse," he said. "People stealing to support their habit."

Those drug-fueled thefts led to the addition of a potpourri of items to the list of things tracked and reported to police including scrap metal, statues, grave markers and most recently gold.

"Used video games are getting swept up into that," Bersell said.

The shift away from paper records and to online computerized databases may have also fueled the drastic increase in the sorts of items being tracked by police, Bersell believes. Before law enforcement used computers to track items sold at pawn shops and secondhand goods stores, they had to keep track of reams of handwritten cards delivered by retailers to police and sheriff deputies. Now that the system is computerized, it's easier to collect that data and easier to quickly manipulate it in the search for stolen property or suspicious trends.

While the association isn't completely opposed to the use of secondhand goods laws to track potentially stolen items, they do keep a close eye on what is being asked of merchants. When a proposed law seems to ask too much of a store, the Entertainment Merchants Association works with legislatures to change it.

"We're not trying to stop these laws," Bersell said. "We're trying to shape them."