The L.A. Police Department has a section on their website for the Art Theft Detail. This is the division in charge of recovering lost paintings and drawings, and their jurisdiction extends to various collectibles. On their section of the L.A.P.D. site, they post pictures of items that have been stolen, ranging from Salvador Dali paintings to Peanuts cels. (Also on display and presumed stolen is an oil portrait of former L.A. mayor Sam Yorty…and you can only wonder what a thief would want with that. Maybe he's going to threaten the city: "Give me ten thousand dollars in cash or I return it!") Anyway, it seems like a good idea to me but I have to wonder about one thing: Over in the "collectibles" section, they have pictures of the covers of Action Comics #1, Detective Comics #1 and Detective Comics #27 which have been reported stolen.
In fact, I myself stole the pictures above of Action #1 and Detective Comics #27 from their site and this brings us to a couple of questions. Are those photos of the actual copies of those three stolen books? Did someone think we might be able to identify the stolen Action Comics #1 from the picture and distinguish it from any other copy of Action Comics #1 we might come across? How does someone prove that a given copy of Action Comics #1 is their copy of Action Comics #1? Did whoever put that photo up think, "Maybe someone will see this picture and remember it when they see a picture of Action Comics #1 for sale? Putting up the pic of the Dali picture makes sense since that's a one-of-a-kind item. What do they think the pictures of the comic books will accomplish?