Inside the investigation that led Minneapolis police to stop reselling duty firearms

NINA MOINI: Law enforcement agencies around the country sell firearms to licensed dealers when they're done with them. Some say it makes financial sense because it helps pay for new equipment. But an investigation by The Trace, Reveal, and CBS News found that since 2006, more than 52,000 police guns were used in crimes. Some of these were lost or stolen, but many were sold.

And after reporters from WCCO-TV shared their findings with Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O'Hara, he said the department will no longer sell its guns. MPD changed its policy in May. Joining me now to talk about the flow of police guns to crime is Alain Stephens. He is a staff writer with the nonprofit newsroom The Trace, which covers gun violence. Alain, thank you for being here.

ALAIN STEPHENS: Thanks for having me.

NINA MOINI: So law enforcement agencies, I'm assuming they're not selling guns to just anyone, right? Who are these licensed dealers that they're selling to?

ALAIN STEPHENS: So, yeah, this process here is where police departments-- so first of all, let's talk about the guns that they are selling. So we're talking about law enforcement duty weapons. So specifically, the weapons that they're carrying in their holsters that they use on their day-to-day use, right? And these are particularly good guns. They're known for their reliability, for their usually larger magazine capacity. And they're well-maintained by armorers, right, and police officers.

And so, yeah, to sometimes upgrade or to get money for variety of other things, what they will do is they will go to licensed gun dealers and essentially sell them. And then those licensed gun dealers go off and sell them back out to the public, typically at a discount.

But over a period of time, with so many law enforcement agencies doing this-- and we took a look at this-- we actually looked at about 60 to 70 of the largest law enforcement entities in the country and found out that in about a decade time period, they had sold about 80,000 weapons, right? And when you put that number of weapons out there, it's bound to start having a collective community cost. And what we found out was that cost was that law enforcement weapons were being found in crimes across the country.

NINA MOINI: I mean, that's a lot of guns that they're selling. So are they monitoring that after they're sold? Or how are they monitored?

ALAIN STEPHENS: Well, absolutely not. So first of all, I just want to make it known that this is a process that often happens in secret. When we went to a lot of police departments, a lot of them denied that they had sold weapons in the first place.

NINA MOINI: Oh.

ALAIN STEPHENS: So when you see a lot of departments talking about, oh, we're saving money, I say, well, why aren't you proud of that? Why don't you put that on the table? When we went to Minneapolis, they were one of the police departments that initially told our team, we weren't involved in this practice. Until we pressed them, and they said, oops, we sold 200 rifles and shotguns.

And so the second thing is, a lot of them wash their hands and say, well, we sell these to federal firearms licensed dealers. But one of the things that police departments don't do but we do as investigative reporters is, we're able to go back and look at ATF inspection reports and to see if those FFLs, those dealers, are up to snuff, right? And what we find time and time again is that the majority of them are not.

When we bring up an exemplar case of a gun that actually came from Stanislaus County Sheriff's Department near Modesto, California, and ended up all the way in Indianapolis, where it killed a teenager, they said a similar thing. They said, listen, we sold this gun to a licensed gun dealer. And they did, LC Action Supply out in California. We found out that LC Action supply had 30 violations of federal firearms law, including inspectors came in there and found out that they were selling guns to people who had criminal backgrounds, that they're missing A&D records over and over again, right?

And so once those guns go out there, right, they bank on the fact that like, OK, it's in someone else's hands, right? But many times, those hands are not particularly clean. And then on top of that, up until 2003, we used to be able to know very granular data about police guns showing up in very specific crime scenes. But in 2003, the NRA lobbied very hard to rip that information away from the public.

And so now we don't really know where these guns are ending up. And the police have used that blanket as a means to say, yeah, we sell these guns, but we don't exactly know if they're hurting anyone. And that's exactly why we sue the federal government to find this out.

NINA MOINI: OK. And I understand you also found that the number of guns traced from crime scenes to police doubled between 2006 and 2021. Why did you find that might be?

ALAIN STEPHENS: So that's part of the information we sued. So we sued the Department of Justice and the ATF to get just raw numbers of how many police guns were being traced to crime scenes across the country. And, yeah, we found that between about 2013 and 2021, about 52,529 weapons were linked to crime scenes and that they were being recovered more rapidly, right, as time went over.

And so part of that is just because you sell more, right, that you sell more. And so you put more out there. And there's something called a time to crime. And so these things start popping up more. And so you got to start thinking of this as a measure of scale, right, of what I call aggregate violence, right? And so you put a lot of them out there, you're going to start finding a lot of them. It's just basic statistics and probabilities.

NINA MOINI: Sure. I can hear just your passion for your reporting. Tell me a little bit about why you wanted to investigate this story.

ALAIN STEPHENS: Well, so I actually like guns. In fact, before I was a reporter, right, I'm a two-branch military vet. I'm an ex-cop. But I used to live in Texas. And one of my first guns was a second-generation Glock that I bought for $400 cash in a parking lot. And that's totally legal, right, to do in Texas. And it came from a former New Jersey police department. And I looked at that gun, and I said, listen, I'm a good guy. But what if I wasn't? And this could be a major problem.

And so when I reported this story and I held onto that notion that I just really wanted to find this out, it's more so-- the way you feel about gun policy is the way you're going to feel about whether or not cops should sell guns, right? I'm not going to change that. But what this is more so about is this. We say these are cop guns, but they're not. They're our guns. They're taxpayer-bought property.

And so the real question is, do taxpayers have the right to know the disposition of taxpayer-bought property, especially when it can kill someone? And is this a decision that police should make on behalf of the community? Or is this something that the community should make a decision on behalf of the police? And when we talk about what money are we saving, let's have a real cost benefit analysis and say, listen, we may be saving a couple hundred dollars here, but do we want to be the police department that may have a rifle that's found in the next major media mass tragedy? Is this something that we want coming down to haunt us down the line?

Let the community have that decision, right? And that is part of American democracy. And I think that is the real big question, right? Do we have the right to ask this of our police, especially when many of these police departments are also going around doing community gun buybacks, creating tactical teams explicitly to go after certain types of guns?

NINA MOINI: Yeah.

ALAIN STEPHENS: But when it comes to their own, they turn their back and have this metric that's like, well, our guns just flow into only good guys' hands. They never use that logic, they never use that language anywhere else until confronted with this. And so, yeah, it's just more of a transparency issue for me.

NINA MOINI: Sure. And so we heard about the response you got from Minneapolis Police Department. How did other law enforcement agencies respond to your reporting? Did you talk to any others in our state here in Minnesota? And what do you hope that happens as a result of your reporting?

ALAIN STEPHENS: So we did get a number of other agencies within your state that did come forth and say that, we had sold weapons. Majority of them are pretty steadfast in their practice. I mean, I'm a criminal justice reporter. I'm an arms trafficking reporter. I'm used to this in the law enforcement context. And to be honest, once you've sold the weapon, that liability is out there. And so they're going to stand on that practice. And that's exactly what a lot of them did.

A lot of them came back and said, well, this is something that we did as a cost-saving measure. This is something that we do. But I will say on this, on background with some of these departments. I have hit them with the haunting question, which is, it's taken me seven years to track down these 52,000 weapons. Don't make it take another seven years for me to show up at your doorstep with the actual rifle that was used in that school shooting. And then we sit here with egg on our face and be like, who knew? How did we get here? Because now we know.

And so I just would also say, proceed with caution. And there are a lot of departments, just to put this out here, that do not do this. The federal government does not do this for this exact reason. And a lot more departments who we did contact thought we were crazy for even asking this question. They were totally like, what? Who's selling guns? What are you talking about? I talked to former FBI agents who were like, this is going on? And I've also talked to former law enforcement agents who worked undercover work and have come across former cop guns in the wild--

NINA MOINI: Wow.

ALAIN STEPHENS: --in the hands of arms traffickers and stuff. And I've said this can not only get the community killed, this could get fellow law enforcement officers killed.

NINA MOINI: Alain, absolutely. Yeah, this is really powerful reporting. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing this with us.

ALAIN STEPHENS: Thanks for having me.

NINA MOINI: That was Alain Stephens, a reporter for The Trace, a nonprofit news outlet focused on gun violence. You can hear more on this story in an episode of Reveal, which airs right here on MPR News Saturday at 5:00 PM.