This story was revealed in partnership with CBS Information & Stations and The Hint.
Greater than a dozen regulation enforcement businesses have stopped reselling their used weapons or pledged to rethink the observe after an investigation by The Hint, CBS Information, and Reveal from The Heart for Investigative Reporting.
The investigation, revealed final yr, revealed that greater than 52,000 former police weapons had resurfaced in robberies, home violence incidents, homicides, and different crimes between 2006 and 2022. Lots of these weapons discovered their approach into civilian palms after businesses traded them to retailers for reductions on new tools or resold them to their very own officers.
In a January report about gun trafficking, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives warned regulation enforcement towards reselling weapons due to the frequency with which former police weapons are utilized in violent crimes.
The Hint and CBS Information subsequently contacted 60 regulation enforcement businesses with a historical past of reselling weapons to ask whether or not they had modified their insurance policies.
Twenty-one departments responded. 4 — the Cincinnati, Columbus, and Sacramento police departments, in addition to the Monmouth County Sheriff’s Workplace in New Jersey — confirmed they’d stopped reselling weapons after final yr’s investigation. (As The Hint and CBS Information beforehand reported, the investigation prompted the Indianapolis and Minneapolis police departments to additionally discontinue gun resales.)
Seven extra businesses stated they’d overview their insurance policies in gentle of the ATF’s suggestion. These businesses are the Wisconsin State Patrol, the New York State Police, the Newark Police Division, the sheriff’s workplaces in California’s San Diego and Orange counties, the Colorado State Patrol, and the Boulder County Sheriff’s Workplace.
“We shall be contemplating a coverage change relating to promoting weapons owned by the Boulder County Sheriff’s Workplace this yr,” Boulder County Sheriff Curtis Johnson instructed The Hint. He stated the company would wish to test with the county commissioners to make sure they’d sufficient cash to exchange previous tools with out the trade-in low cost, however he believed they’d assist extra funding if wanted.
Police forces typically resell weapons as a result of gun shops supply trade-in worth, permitting departments to offset the price of tools upgrades and, authorities have argued, save taxpayer cash. Companies that select to eliminate the weapons not solely forfeit the trade-in worth however should additionally pay an organization to destroy them.
A number of businesses cited budgetary issues as their motive for persevering with to resell weapons.
Mark Kennedy, chief of the Quincy Police Division in Massachusetts, instructed CBS Information that he feared his officers’ used weapons might wind up in crimes, however that his division couldn’t afford to alter its coverage. “If it wasn’t price prohibitive, I might completely destroy them,” he stated.
In Kentucky, regulation enforcement’s palms are tied. A state regulation requires businesses to promote weapons they not want, together with departmental weapons and people seized in reference to crimes.
In 2019, a Kentucky State Police pistol resold to a retiring detective ended up in Buffalo, New York, the place federal brokers confiscated it whereas serving a search warrant on a homicide suspect. When CBS Information requested whether or not the Kentucky State Police’s coverage had modified, a spokesperson pointed to the state regulation, noting the company “is required to conform.”
Researchers say that whereas trade-ins can minimize an company’s prices by tens of hundreds of {dollars}, taxpayers in the end bear the monetary burden of the violence wrought with resold police weapons — a value that may far outstrip financial savings on new tools. A 2010 Iowa State College research estimated the price of a single murder at greater than $17 million. That price ticket consists of spending on emergency response and crime scene cleanup, misplaced wages and tax income, salaries for investigators, and the price of incarcerating suspects.
Scot Thomasson, a former ATF particular agent, stated regulation enforcement businesses steadily negotiate trade-ins with out express approval from native elected officers, leaving taxpayers unaware that the police weapons their cash bought might find yourself in civilian palms.
“The taxpayer pays for these weapons for use by police for the safety of their neighborhood,” Thomasson stated. “Now that gun might wind up in a felony’s palms for use towards the identical taxpayer that paid for it. It’s simply plain mistaken.”
In its January warning to regulation enforcement businesses, the ATF stated it had recognized greater than 1,000 former police weapons recovered in homicides and one other 2,000 confiscated from convicted felons between 2019 and 2023.
The ATF additionally cited a 1998 decision from the Worldwide Affiliation of Chiefs of Police that instructed businesses to not resell weapons. The decision famous that “the recirculation of those firearms again into the final inhabitants will increase the supply of firearms which might be used once more to kill or injure extra law enforcement officials and residents.”
However William Brooks, a former Norwood, Massachusetts, police chief who now heads the IACP’s firearms committee, stated IACP resolutions expire after 5 years, and the 1998 steerage is unlikely to be revived when the group meets to contemplate new resolutions this spring.
“I’d like to see metropolis governments totally fund these weapons purchases in order that departments can eliminate their previous firearms,” Brooks stated. “But when they don’t, it ought to be as much as departments to determine whether or not they’re going to move on an improve they’ll’t afford and not using a trade-in.”
Brooks argued that destroying used police weapons wouldn’t stop violence as a result of firearms are already extensively obtainable and straightforward for the general public to accumulate.
Michael Sierra-Arévalo, an affiliate sociology professor on the College of Texas at Austin and creator of “The Hazard Crucial: Violence, Dying, and the Soul of Policing,” stated he wasn’t conscious of any peer-reviewed analysis linking police trade-ins to will increase in violence, however he additionally hadn’t seen proof proving the observe was protected.
“The state has a accountability to be conservative in these conditions,” he stated. “I might query the ethical standing of somebody who’s keen to gamble with the lifetime of a single member of the general public on the grounds that they don’t have empirical proof {that a} change of coverage would stop their demise.”
“We all know that persons are killed with these weapons. That ought to be sufficient.”
