Since 2006, more than 52,000 police guns were used in crimes across the U.S. In many cases, these weapons ended up in the hands of the general public in completely legal ways. Law enforcement agencies, including the Oregon State Police and the Portland Police Bureau, have sold or traded-in their firearms to gun stores or manufacturers in order to obtain newer models. Chris Hacker is an investigative data reporter with CBS News who reported on this trend in collaboration with The Trace and Reveal. He joins us to share more on their reporting.
Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Since 2006, more than 50,000 guns that were originally owned by police departments were tied to crimes committed across the US. In most cases, these weapons ended up in the hands of the general public in completely legal ways. That’s because law enforcement agencies, including Oregon State Police and the Portland Police Bureau, sell or trade in their firearms to gun stores or manufacturers in order to obtain newer models. Chris Hacker is an investigative data reporter with CBS News. He reported on this issue in collaboration with The Trace and Reveal. He joins us now with more details. Chris, welcome to the show.
Chris Hacker: Thanks for having me.
Miller: How common was it, among law enforcement agencies across the country that you and your team surveyed, to sell or trade in their old firearms?
Hacker: This was a really widespread practice. I was not expecting that to be the case. But through the reporting process over the last two years, we found hundreds of police departments in the US that do this. It was, to be honest with you, quite rare to find a department that did not, in some way, engage in this practice.
Miller: How old are these guns, in general?
Hacker: It depends. I’ve seen guns sold that were a decade or two old, and I’ve seen guns that were traded in much more quickly after they were purchased. And obviously, those guns tend to be more desirable to the public market.
Miller: Is it fair to assume that, if these guns were eventually purchased by new owners, and if some of them were eventually used in crimes, that they’re in good working order?
Hacker: Yeah, they tend to be in extremely good working order. And that’s one of the things that makes them so desirable. I talked to a lot of people and watched a lot of YouTube videos, and read blog posts online and gun forums that were really advertising these guns as an excellent bargain because they can be purchased at a low price and are in, typically, very good condition.
Miller: So, in general, what are the reasons that police departments are getting rid of these firearms?
Hacker: There are a couple of different reasons and it depends on the department’s specific policy. But the most common reason the departments trade in their guns or sell their guns is when they’ve decided that they want to upgrade their firearms. I’ve seen different departments do this on different schedules but it tends to be every, say, five to 10 years, a department will decide that they, for whatever reason, need to purchase new guns. Perhaps they have decided that they want to change the caliber of the weapons their officers are carrying, and that’s actually what happened with the Washington State Patrol in late 2017 or early 2018. Spokesperson told us they exchanged more than 1,000 pistols with a local dealer when they transitioned from 40 calibers to 9mm pistols.
Miller: Do you have a sense for how much money a police department might save by selling or trading in their used guns, as opposed to destroying them or having them destroyed?
Hacker: Yeah, it’s a massive cost savings for these departments. In one case, for example, the Baltimore Police Department chose not to do this after there was an incident in which one of the guns for a neighboring department had been used in a homicide. And it costs them over half a million dollars. The way these things work is, when they do the trade-ins or these upgrades, it works exactly the same way as, perhaps when you sell or trade your old cell phone, when you get the newest model.
Miller: Or maybe your car ...
Hacker: Or maybe your car. Exactly. And that’s exactly how these things work. And it tends to reduce the cost by 50%, even more, and I’ve seen cases where it’s even a $0 transaction. So the department gets a whole batch of new guns in exchange for their old guns, and no actual cash is exchanged.
Miller: So, I imagine that the main argument that law enforcement agencies would put forward is “Hey, we are being good stewards of limited taxpayer money.”
Hacker: Absolutely. And that was the main justification that we received. And it also lets them, in certain cases, purchase new weapons without necessarily having to get as much approval from the city, especially in smaller towns where perhaps the city council might not have a lot of budget to give them. It’s a great way for them to do an end run around that process and get the new guns that they want.
Miller: That was a point that you heard from a sociologist at the University of Texas who said that trade-ins allow police to avoid public scrutiny. What exactly was he getting at?
Hacker: That’s exactly right. If a department wants to get new guns through the normal way or without doing this process, they would have to go to their city council or their county government or whatever it may be, and say we need half a million dollars to purchase this number of new firearms. There’s going to be debate, it’s going to need approval, there’s going to be disagreement, it might be made public.
Whereas, if they go through one of these buyback programs, oftentimes it’s a decision that’s not even being made by the top brass of the department. We found a number of cases in which it was so under the radar that the leadership of the agency wasn’t even aware that it was a thing that they had done until we told them.
Miller: Law enforcement agencies in Oregon and around the country have events where they ask people, they say, “Hey, you can turn in your guns,” and they sometimes explicitly say that their communities are safer because “X” number of people turned in their guns, and those guns are off the street. Are these same departments turning around and selling their own guns on the open market, or selling them so that they will then be sold on the open market?
Hacker: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And it was one of the core contradictions that we found in this policy. Police departments spend a lot of time talking about the need to get guns off the street, to reduce the flow of firearms in the public market, because that’s what fuels violent crimes. And they do hold these gun buyback events where they’ll offer members of the public cash or gift cards in exchange for turning in guns to the department, and those guns ostensibly are to be destroyed.
But what the police departments don’t often advertise is the fact that at the same time, they’re often putting more guns back onto the street than they’re getting off in these buybacks. One of the examples that we highlighted in our story was the Newark Police Department in New Jersey. In 2021, they offered the public up to 250 bucks for each gun they turned over. That event netted 146 guns and that was a huge win for them. The city’s public safety director said, without question, that number of guns off the street means less gun violence, fewer gun violence victims and less risk of death. But then five years earlier, the New York Police Department had resold more than five times that number of guns, just under 1,000. And one of those guns resurfaced in Pittsburgh, where it was taken off a convicted felon.
Miller: Well, how do they justify that?
Hacker: It’s the same argument that you hear from a lot of departments, which is, they need to do this because they need to make sure their weapons are the newest and latest models and are up to date, and it’s a way to get guns off the street. We didn’t really hear from any departments that wanted to address that contradiction directly, but it was definitely a widespread practice that we saw.
Miller: Not just widespread, but growing. Your analysis found that the number of law enforcement guns used in crimes or connected to crime scenes, more than doubled between 2006 and 2021. How do you explain that?
Hacker: It’s a little bit of a black box. We’re not entirely sure what’s happening there, but you’re exactly right. The number of guns that have been traced to crime scenes has grown consistently just about every single year that we have data for. I’ve got numbers going back to 2006 and coming up through 2021, the last year of data that we have that’s complete.
Around the beginning of that data, there were about 2,200 guns that were sold by police departments and then recovered in crime scenes and then traced by the ATF, which is the federal law enforcement agency that handles all firearms tracing in the United States. The most recent year of data that we have, the number was over 4,500. Now, the number of guns in the US, generally, is also increasing, and this trend does mirror that. Without more data it’s a little bit hard for us to figure out exactly what’s going on.
Miller: What did you hear when you talked to the Portland Police Bureau?
Hacker: We had a very brief back-and-forth with them, in part of our survey. We reached out to hundreds of police departments across the United States, asking them what their policy was and what they had done.
We reached out to the Portland Police Department and they told us that they do sell guns back to local firearms dealers on a rolling basis, which is the standard practice that we’ve seen. Then they gave them credit at the FFL’s [Federal Firearms Licenses] for when they decided to make those new purchases. It appeared that the Portland Police Bureau did this every time an officer retires. When the officer retires, they would trade the gun back in, get some credit for that. And then that credit would be applied towards the purchase of a new gun for a new officer.
Miller: What about the Oregon State Police?
Hacker: The Oregon State Police show us a very similar thing. We didn’t get a ton of specifics from them either, but we do know that they sold their guns to a company out of California, called Proforce Law Enforcement guns. It’s very similar to what Portland does. They, on an ongoing rolling basis, trade those guns back in, and then they get a pending credit balance that they’re able to apply whenever they want.
One other thing that the Oregon State Police told us that I thought was especially interesting, was that they also allow their own officers to purchase their weapons. So when a police officer retires or switches jobs, that officer has the opportunity to purchase a firearm from the department, to then keep for personal use. I don’t have as many specifics on that as I do on certain other departments. But it’s often the case that those types of officer purchases give those officers that firearm at a very discounted rate, and then the officers are free to do whatever they want with those guns, including potentially selling them for a profit.
Miller: Do you know how many firearms that came from Oregon law enforcement agencies were eventually connected to crimes?
Hacker: We don’t. We have that number of 52,000 firearms, but drilling down beyond that is nearly impossible. And that’s because of the secrecy surrounding firearms tracing information in the United States.
Like I said earlier, the ATF or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, handles firearm traces for every law enforcement agency in the country that participates. That means when a gun is recovered, the law enforcement agency reaches out to ATF and the ATF says where that gun came from. They’re the only entity in the US that has the ability to do that. Well, there are some federal laws that have made it nearly impossible for the ATF to release any information about its tracing activities besides big national aggregate totals. So essentially, the only entity that could answer that question for you would be the ATF, but their hands are tied by federal law.
Miller: Chris Hacker, thanks very much.
Hacker: Thank you.
Miller: Chris Hacker is an investigative data reporter with CBS News. His recent article focuses on police guns being used in crimes. You can read it at The Trace.
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