California Police Fail to Track Guns Used in Crimes
Between 2010 and 2020, more than 150 police agencies in California failed to flag more than half of their recovered crime guns for tracing in the state’s Automated Firearms System.
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Law enforcement agencies across California are failing to correctly log guns in a state firearms database, preventing thousands of weapons from being traced by the federal government, potentially hampering police investigations, and keeping gun smugglers in the shadows, reports The Trace. Between 2010 and 2020, more than 150 police agencies in California failed to flag more than half of their recovered crime guns for tracing in the state’s Automated Firearms System (AFS). State records show that, of those agencies, more than 20 designated no guns as crime guns at all. In total, California agencies improperly entered more than 90,000 guns in the AFS over the last decade.
The California Department of Justice, the agency that maintains the state’s gun database, said that guns classified as evidence should also be classified as crime guns, but that the state Legislature has not prescribed penalties for agencies that log firearms incorrectly. In some cases, departments may bypass the state’s gun database and trace guns directly with the ATF, although state records and interviews with dozens of officers suggest that doesn’t happen frequently. Even when agencies entered guns in the state database correctly they often failed to use the results in their investigations. In 2020, California endured a 31 percent spike in homicides, and policing experts and former federal officials say that not tracing guns could hobble law enforcement’s ability to reverse that increase and plug trafficking routes that have armed droves of criminals.
