Catherine Rusoff
About nine times a day over two decades, a gun used in a crime has been traced back to its original owner: a law enforcement agency.
A joint investigation by CBS News, The Trace and Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting found at least 52,000 such incidents and identified more than 140 law enforcement agencies that sell or trade their weapons, allowing dealers to resell them.
Here’s a look at the investigation’s key findings. You can read and watch the full investigation here.
Resold or exchanged police weapons are ending up in the hands of criminals
Law enforcement agencies are selling and trading their old weapons – often to reduce costs while upgrading. A side effect: tens of thousands of these weapons ended up in the hands of criminals.
They have been used in shootings, domestic violence incidents and other violent crimes, according to records obtained from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and hundreds of U.S. law enforcement agencies.
ATF internal records show that at least 52,529 police weapons have been found at crime scenes since 2006, the first year government data is available.
CBS News journalists surveyed state and local law enforcement agencies from coast to coast and found that at least 143 agencies resold their guns between 2006 and 2022. That represents about 90% of the agencies that responded.
Police sell their guns even during buyback events to get other guns off the streets
Many of the law enforcement agencies that resold or traded his guns were the same ones that routinely hold gun buyback events that they say are aimed at reducing the number of guns on the streets.
The Philadelphia Police Department boasts on its website that it has collected 825 guns in buybacks since 2021.
But records obtained in the CBS News investigation show that the agency has resold at least 886 of its officers’ service weapons over the past two decades.
The Newark Police Department conducted a buyback in 2021, offering $250 for each firearm. People turned in 146 weapons.
“Without a doubt, 146 fewer firearms on our streets means less gun violence, fewer victims of gun violence, and less risk of suicide or death,” Public Safety Director Brian O’Hara said in a YouTube post.
Five years earlier, the Newark agency resold more than five times that number of guns — nearly 1,000. One ended up in Pittsburgh, where police seized it from a convicted felon in 2019 after he allegedly fired more than a dozen shots into a neighborhood and then led officers on a foot chase.
A Newark Police spokesman said the weapons were marketed as a cost-cutting measure under the previous administration.
The data behind this investigation is data that Congress voted to keep secret
In 2003, Congress passed the Tiahrt Amendment. Named after the lawmaker who introduced it, Tiahrt prohibits the ATF from allowing the public to see most trace information about guns used in crimes.
The ATF cited the Tiahrt amendment in rejecting a public records request filed in 2017 by our reporting partners in this project, Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting.
Reveal processed. In 2020, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the ATF must release some of the summary statistical information.
The limited records released during this litigation showed that more than 52,000 guns used in crimes were traced to law enforcement agencies. A small sampling of the underlying data showed that at least 800 antique firearms from different agencies ended up at crime scenes.
Some law enforcement agencies take a different path and destroy their old weapons
Federal law enforcement agencies are legally required to destroy their used weapons. State and local agencies make their own decisions.
Most sell or trade them – but not all.
In Seattle, police stopped selling guns around 2016.
“If we sell them, we just don’t know where these weapons might end up,” said Police Chief Adrian Diaz. “We don’t want to contribute to the problem.”
Indianapolis Police Chief Christopher Bailey told CBS News that his agency has historically marketed its weapons, but he would consider changing that policy after a recent shooting death involving an old police gun sold by a sheriff’s office in California.
“I don’t want any gun we own to end up being used violently against another person,” Bailey said.
After CBS News Minnesota showed our findings to Minneapolis police officers, Police Chief Brian O’Hara said his department would change its policy.
“I don’t want us to be in a position where a weapon that was once used by the police here ends up being used in a crime, or in an act of violence against a person, or even to shoot a police officer. official,” O’Hara said. “So going forward, we will not sell any weapons.”
