Objects recovered from burglaries put online in south-west France

The gendarmerie in Vienne (Nouvelle-Aquitaine) has created a website to display items that officers have recovered in the hope of finding the original owners.

Hundreds of items, including jewellery, quad bikes and keys that were recovered in a police raid are now being displayed online.

The website can be found here.

If you have been the victim of a burglary in the south-west, you can reclaim your items by contacting the website and providing proof that they belong to you.

Read more: What to do (and not to do) after a home burglary in France

The Vienne gendarmerie first used this system in 2021, and it is one of several such websites used by local police forces around France.

Gendarmes in the Nord provide a similar website, called Ovninord, managed in accordance with the Belgian authorities.

However, such dedicated websites are by no means the norm.

How do police in France contact the owners of stolen property?

While the police and gendarmerie in some areas have permanent websites to display items recovered in raids, others use temporary websites, social media or alerts issued via the mairie.

Many use posts on X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook.

For example, following a raid in August in Normandy, the Calvados gendarmerie published the following post on Facebook:

People who have been burgled or had items stolen should follow their local police and gendarmerie on social media to make sure that they do not miss information should the authorities fail to contact them.

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