When I mentioned my column to my dad, he usually asked, "What are you complaining about this week?" Well, at the risk of being boring, this week I bring you good news.

Tucson police are right up to date on efforts to recover stolen property. They have a system in which pawnshops, e-Bay sales stations and others in the business of receiving goods from the public are hooked into computerized cash registers. The employee takes the required information from the seller, gets ID and so on.

At the end of the day, the system uploads details of that day’s business to the police. There, the master computer looks to match property received with property stolen, which has been input into the computer earlier.

Police have had gratifying results. It is faster than creating reports by hand, filing them by hand, and trying to match them by hand. The system replaces several employees.

Taxpayers pay for the system. The shops hook up at no charge. It saves the taxpayers in the number of man-hours used to collate and investigate crimes. It also eliminates a number of employees who used to do in hours what the computer does in seconds.

But not every shop is on the system. By law, scrap metal dealers, who are in a prime position to receive stolen metals, are required to report this same information to the Department of Public Safety. Unfortunately, DPS still handles the information the old-fashioned way. I am told that agency is inundated and not nearly keeping up with the reports.

This leaves the scrap metal dealers as good places to fence stolen metals. Most dealers don’t want stolen material. But I suppose when you’re in the scrap metal business, you need to get scrap metal.

With the price of metals climbing almost as fast as gasoline, there are strong incentives for thieves to rip off construction sites (if there are any right now) and even to destroy metallic infrastructure and sell the metal to a scrap dealer.

We have heard reports from all over the country of highway guard rails, traffic signs, pieces of lights and their connecting wires, historical markers, even funeral urns, all vandalized to be melted down for their metal value.

These thieves are slowly stripping the elements of our civilization away to sell for scrap. That’s a particularly bad deal. If a person steals the lights from a street, he leaves the street dark, and sells the lights for their weight in metal. The thief might get $25 for the aluminum content of a light that costs far more than that.

But this type of investigation is laborious to do the old-fashioned way. Even with the law requiring scrap dealers to report to DPS, there seems to be no good reason the companies couldn’t join this system and report to both agencies.

DPS should get with the program and either get its own system or consolidate with local police. There is no excuse for doing it by hand anymore. In reality, most of the information is so late that its investigative value is minimal.

I spoke to Tucson Police Sgt. Randy Carpenter, who confirmed that the system works well and has been successful. This is a great service to the Tucson community. Even Phoenix doesn’t have it.

Not only does this system discourage burglaries, it pretty much pays for itself. This is a system every police agency in the country should have. We do. Good for us. And let’s get DPS on board, too.