Four findings from our investigation into gun sales by police departments

About nine times a day over two decades, a gun used in a crime could be traced back to its original owner: a law enforcement agency.

A joint investigation by CBS News, The Trace and Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting found at least 52,000 such incidents and identified more than 140 police departments that sell or trade their guns and allow dealers to then resell them.

Here you will find an overview of the most important results of the study. You can read and watch the complete investigation here.

Police weapons that are resold or traded end up in the hands of criminals

Law enforcement agencies sell and exchange their old service weapons – often to save on upgrading costs. A side effect: tens of thousands of these weapons have ended up in the hands of criminals.

They have been used in shootings, domestic violence incidents and other violent crimes, according to records from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and hundreds of U.S. police departments.

Internal ATF records show at least 52,529 police weapons have turned up at crime scenes since 2006. The earliest data available from the government is for this year.

CBS News journalists surveyed state and local law enforcement agencies from coast to coast and found that at least 143 agencies resold their weapons between 2006 and 2022. That’s about 90% of the agencies that responded.

Police sell their guns even as they conduct buybacks to get other guns off the streets

Many of the police departments that resold or traded in their guns were the same ones that regularly conduct gun buybacks that they say are aimed at reducing the number of guns on the street.

The Philadelphia Police Department boasts on its website that it has collected 825 guns through buybacks since 2021.

But records obtained as part of the CBS News investigation show that the agency has resold at least 886 of its officers’ former service weapons over the past two decades.

The Newark Police Department conducted a buyback in 2021, offering $250 for each firearm. People handed over 146 weapons.

“Without question, 146 fewer guns on our streets means less gun violence, fewer victims of gun violence and a lower 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 as many guns – nearly 1,000. One ended up in Pittsburgh, where police confiscated 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 chase.

A Newark Police spokesman said the weapons were traded in as a cost-saving measure under a previous administration.

The data underlying this investigation is data that Congress has voted to keep secret

In 2003, Congress passed the Tiahrt Amendment. Named for the lawmaker who introduced it, Tiahrt prohibits the ATF from releasing to the public most trace information about weapons 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 sued. In 2020, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that ATF must release some of the summary statistical information.

The limited records released during this litigation showed that more than 52,000 weapons used in crimes could be traced to law enforcement. A small sample of the underlying data showed that the old firearms ended up at crime scenes from at least 800 different agencies.

Some police departments are taking a different approach and destroying their old weapons

Federal law enforcement agencies are required by law to destroy their used weapons. State and local authorities make their own decisions.

Most sell or trade them – but not all.

In Seattle, police stopped dealing in handguns around 2016.

“If we sell them, we just don’t know where these weapons 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 that his department has traded in its weapons in the past, but he is considering changing that policy after a recent shooting involving a former police weapon fired by a sheriff office in California was sold.

“I don’t want any weapon we own to end up being used violently against another person,” Bailey said.

After CBS News Minnesota presented our findings to Minneapolis police officials, Police Chief Brian O’Hara said his department would change its policies.

“I don’t want us to end up in a situation where a weapon that was once used by the police here is then used in a crime, in an act of violence against a person, or even in the shooting of a police officer.” officer,” O’Hara said. “So in the future we will no longer sell weapons at all.”