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 the Center for Investigative Reporting's Reveal has 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 later.
Below are the main findings of the research. You can read and view the full investigation here.
Police weapons sold or traded are ending up in the hands of criminals
Law enforcement agencies sell and trade in their old weapons, often to cut costs when upgrading. A side effect: tens of thousands of these guns have 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 US law enforcement agencies.
Internal ATF records show that at least 52,529 police weapons turned up at crime scenes since 2006, the earliest year data available from the government.
CBS News reporters 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's about 90 percent of agencies who answered
Police sell their guns even as they hold buyback events to get other guns off the street
Many of the law enforcement agencies that resold or traded their guns were the same ones that regularly 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 a CBS News investigation show the agency resold at least 886 of its officers' former service weapons over the past two decades.
The Newark Police Department held a buyback in 2021, offering $250 for each firearm. People turned in 146 guns.
“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 in a neighborhood and then led officers on a foot chase.
A Newark police spokesman said the weapons had been exchanged as a cost-saving measure under a 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 information about guns used in crimes.
ATF cited the Tiahrt Amendment in denying a public records request filed in 2017 by our reporting partners on this project, Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting.
Reveal defendant. In 2020, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the ATF must release some of the summary statistical information.
Limited records released during that litigation showed that more than 52,000 guns used in crimes had been traced back to law enforcement. A small sample of the underlying data showed that at least 800 old firearms from different agencies ended up at crime scenes.
Some law enforcement agencies go a different route 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 trading guns around 2016.
“If we sell them, we just don't know where those guns could end up,” said Police Chief Adrian Diaz. “We don't want to contribute to the problem.”
Indianapolis Police Chief Christopher Bailey told CBS News his agency has historically traded in its guns, but would consider changing that policy after a recent shooting death involving an old police weapon sold by sheriff's office in California.
“I don't want any weapon that we had to end up being used violently against another person,” Bailey said.
After CBS News Minnesota showed Minneapolis police officials our findings, 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 in the service of the police department here ends up being used in a crime, or in an act of violence against a person, or even to shoot the police. officer,” O'Hara said. “So, going forward, we won't be selling any guns.”
