Catherine Rusoff
Every year, thousands of guns that once belonged to police departments are used in crimes across the United States. Many begin as the pistol in a police officer’s holster, but are then sold through an opaque network of gun dealers, recirculated on the public market and eventually recovered by other law enforcement officials.
The federal government knows which departments’ weapons end up at crime scenes most often. They know which gun stores resell the most old police weapons that are later used in crimes. They know the journeys these weapons take, the crimes they commit and, in many cases, who committed them.
But Congress will not allow them to tell the public what they know.
In 2003, Republican member of Congress Todd Tiahrt of Kansas introduced an amendment to a federal spending bill that severely restricted the ability of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to release details about guns specific information they track.
As the only agency with access to gun transaction data, the ATF tracks hundreds of thousands of firearms a year on behalf of every law enforcement agency, from small-town sheriffs to the FBI.
Between 2017 and 2021, the ATF located more than 1.9 million guns, according to a March 2024 report. But under the Tiahrt Amendment, they can only release the most basic aggregate information about them: totals by year, by state, by type of weapon. It is rare to obtain more detailed data.
In 2017, Alain Stephens, an investigative reporter for The dash — CBS News’ partner in this investigation — filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the ATF regarding the number of guns traced to authorities. The information existed in the ATF database but was not released.
The medium of investigative journalism Center for Investigative Reporting revelation sued the ATF on Stephens’ behalf. After three years of litigation, the ATF finally produced a single spreadsheet. The data had two columns: the year and the number of guns traced to national law enforcement agencies. The numbers included lost or stolen weapons, but also documented weapons that were sold by authorities.
It confirmed what had already been widely reported before Tiahrt made it nearly impossible to obtain this information: police sell guns, and those guns often end up in crimes.
In 2022, The Trace and CBS News began working to answer a key question: which departments sell their guns, and would it be possible for us to trace those guns to crime scenes?
Journalists from CBS News and The Trace filed more than 200 public records requests, asking local departments for records of their gun sales. We focus primarily on the largest departments in the country. We also reached out to some smaller agencies near local CBS News stations in major U.S. cities.
Through these requests and dozens of interviews with law enforcement officials, we compiled a list of more than 140 departments that have sold their weapons. That represents about 9 in 10 agencies that responded to our requests – although many agencies refused to respond or heavily redacted the records they provided.
We also submit requests for data on guns recovered by police departments from crime scenes. Using this data, data collected by The Trace for a previous project on lost and stolen guns, and tens of thousands of pages of federal court filings, we built a database of nearly 1 million guns used in crimes.
Under federal law, every gun in the U.S. must have a serial number — a unique identifier from the gun’s manufacturer that the ATF can use to track it.
We have compiled a list of serial numbers for approximately 30,000 guns sold or traded by police – a small fraction of the guns sold by police. By comparing this small sample of serial numbers to the records of 1 million guns recovered by police, we identified dozens of potential cases in which sold police guns were used in crimes.
We then check the facts of each case, reviewing records and interviewing police officers to find out what happened.
Chris Hacker
