Established sometime between the late 1960s to early 1970s, this Hemmant Road base has a history of being the location where the police force handles lost and found items returned by the public.
In the 1970s, the base was called the Hemmant Road Police Store. Sounds of the hammering of mallet and proceedings of auctions can be heard as confiscated, unclaimed and condemned properties went under the hammer at public auctions held regularly at the base.
The Police Logistics Department was formed as a separate unit on 1 November 1981 and subsequently, called the Hemmant Road base its home. During the 1980s, a group of six tailors was also based on site. Attached to the quartermaster’s office at the base, they helped with specialised stitching work such as fixing badges of rank onto ceremonial cords and altering police uniforms and ceremonial outfits.
Currently, the base is called the Police Logistics Department (Police Logistics Base). The Police Logistics Department provides timely mission-centric capabilities for the force and is responsible for the acquisition, distribution, maintenance and disposal of things such as equipment, automotive and infrastructures.
Also located at this base is the Found and Unclaimed Property Office, continuing with the building’s heritage of being the site where lost items from the public are processed. The office has a storage room roughly the size of two rooms of an HDB flat and deals with lost items from the usual keys and wallets to the occasional quirky item such as a Formula One race tyre warmer. Their approach to locating the owners varies from trying to identify the owner’s identity by piecing together clues from sources such as passports to trawling through a database of lost reports, which vastly outnumber the reports of items found. Items, whose owners cannot be located, are either disposed or auctioned off while any unclaimed cash is surrendered to the state.
Buildings and sites featured on Roots.SG are part of our efforts to raise awareness of our heritage; a listing on Roots.SG does not imply any form of preservation or conservation status, unless it is mentioned in the article. The information in this article is valid as of May 2019 and is not intended to be an exhaustive history of the site/building.
