People raid local police station looking for deals (18 photos)

People came out in droves Saturday morning to find a deal or two at the police auction, resulting in long lineups just to get inside the property and evidence building to look at what was up for grabs prior to the start of the auction.

“We gather a lot of evidence over the year, and the police services act says the way we can get rid of it is to have a public auction,” said Sgt. Steve Miron of the Sault Ste. Marie Police Service. “So all the stuff that’s unclaimed goes into a public auction.”

Miron says that everything up for grabs at the police auction is sold as is, with all proceeds from the auction going directly to the local Police Services Board.

It’s been a year-and-a-half since the last auction, Miron says, and that probably has a lot to do with the sheer amount of property that is up for sale.

“I think because we’ve had a lot of property this time, we’ve been setting this one up for a couple of months,” Miron said. “We put it on our Facebook page and our Twitter page.”

“We did our advertising, and the weather’s nice,” he continued, as people jammed into the small, fenced off room to look at goods ranging from chainsaws to picture frames. “There’s a lot of people here, so I think the social media thing we did this time was a lot better for us.”

The Sault Ste. Marie Police Service is currently looking at doing online auctions in the very near future.

Miron says that city police did look into using a company from southern Ontario in order to do online auctions, but it would’ve been difficult to get all the property down there in order to be placed on the company’s website.

Now the local police is looking at the costs and logistics of doing its own online auction.

“We’d have to build a proper website to do that, and that might cost a little bit of money, but I think it’d be a more efficient way to get this stuff out to the public.”

Future police auctions could go online as early as next year.