Yearly, thousands of guns once owned by police departments are used in crimes throughout the U.S. Many begin out because the pistol in a cop’s holster, however are later offered by means of an opaque community of gun sellers, recirculated into the general public market and ultimately recovered by different regulation enforcement officers.
The federal authorities is aware of which departments’ weapons find yourself in crime scenes most frequently. They know which gun shops resell essentially the most former police weapons which can be later utilized in crimes. They know the journeys these weapons journey, the crimes they’re dedicated with, and in lots of instances who dedicated them.
However Congress will not allow them to inform the general public what they know.
In 2003, Republican Member of Congress Todd Tiahrt of Kansas launched an modification to a federal spending invoice that severely restricted the power of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to launch particulars on particular weapons they hint.
As the one company with entry to gun transaction information, the ATF traces a whole bunch of hundreds of firearms a 12 months on behalf of each regulation enforcement company, from small city sheriffs to the FBI.
Between 2017 and 2021, the ATF traced greater than 1.9 million weapons, in line with a March 2024 report. However below the Tiahrt Modification, they will solely launch essentially the most primary mixture details about them: totals by 12 months, by state, by kind of gun. It is uncommon to acquire extra detailed information.
In 2017, Alain Stephens, an investigative reporter at The Trace — CBS Information’ accomplice for this investigation — filed a Freedom of Data Act request with the ATF for the variety of weapons traced again to regulation enforcement. The knowledge existed within the ATF’s database, however they did not launch it.
The investigative journalism outlet Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting sued the ATF on Stephens’ behalf. After three years of litigation, the ATF lastly produced a single spreadsheet. The information had two columns: the 12 months and the variety of weapons it had traced to home regulation enforcement companies. The numbers included weapons that had been misplaced or stolen, but in addition documented weapons that had been offered by regulation enforcement.
It confirmed what had beforehand been broadly reported earlier than Tiahrt made it almost unimaginable to get this info: police promote weapons, and people weapons usually find yourself in crimes.
In 2022, The Hint and CBS Information started working to reply a key query: which departments promote their weapons, and was it doable to hint these weapons to crime scenes ourselves?
Journalists at CBS Information and The Hint filed greater than 200 public data requests, asking native departments for data of their gun gross sales. We targeted totally on the nation’s largest departments. We additionally contacted some smaller companies close to CBS Information’ native stations in main U.S. cities.
By way of these requests and dozens of interviews with police officers, we compiled an inventory of greater than 140 departments that offered their weapons. That is about 9 out of 10 of the companies that responded to our requests — although many companies refused to reply or closely redacted the data they did present.
We additionally submitted requests for information about weapons recovered by police departments at crime scenes. Utilizing that information, information gathered by The Hint for a earlier mission on misplaced and stolen weapons, and tens of hundreds of pages of federal court docket filings, we constructed a database of almost 1 million weapons utilized in crimes.
Underneath federal regulation, each gun within the U.S. should have a serial quantity — an identifier distinctive to the weapon’s producer that the ATF can use to hint it.
We compiled an inventory of serial numbers of about 30,000 weapons offered or traded by police — a small fraction of the weapons police offered. By looking out that small pattern of serial numbers in opposition to the data of 1 million weapons recovered by police, we recognized dozens of potential instances the place offered police weapons had been utilized in crimes.
We then fact-checked every case, reviewing data and interviewing police officers to search out out what occurred.
You can watch and read the full investigation here.
