I dug through over 10,000 pages of internal police records to report this story over the last 2 years.
US police departments quietly sell untold numbers of their used guns. Thousands of those guns have turned up at crime scenes.
Some details🧵cbsnews.com/police-selling…
Congress has gone to great lengths to keep this and other gun data out of public view.
Every year, more and more old police guns are showing up at crime scenes.
@reveal and @AlainStephens had to sue ATF to get even these basic totals.
To find out what happened to those guns, we filed over 200 FOIA requests to local police, asking for records.
About 70% responded, and nearly all told us they'd sold used guns.
Unlike the way cops track evidence guns, data on their own firearms was a mess.
A truly shocking number were kept only on paper, or even in handwritten documents.
Here's one example from the Newark PD. Each line is a gun they sold. There were 77 pages like this.
One of the guns in those pages was later recovered by police in Pittsburgh responding to a shotspotter call. We actually got the ATF trace report for that case showing law enforcement knew one of their old guns had wound up in criminal hands.
That's one example among thousands. This map based on data I pulled out of a heavily redacted sample of ATF trace data obtained by @reveal.
This is less than 3% of the full 52,000 police guns we know were traced to crime scenes. It shows over 800 PDs' guns showed up in crimes:
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