American law enforcement agencies spend billions of dollars a year buying new guns. To lighten the budgetary blow, many agencies resell or trade in their used firearms. These weapons eventually make their way to gun store shelves, ready to be taken home by members of the general public.
Sometimes, the guns veer into the hands of criminals.
Records released as part of a lawsuit against the federal government show that tens of thousands of former police guns have surfaced at crime scenes in recent years. That includes a killing in Indianapolis, a shooting in San Antonio, a drug bust in Buffalo. All were crimes involving guns released back onto the market by the very police departments and sheriff’s offices sworn to protect the public.
In a new episode of “Reveal,” a weekly podcast from The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, The Trace’s Alain Stephens reports on law enforcement’s fight to keep information about gun resales a secret, and how the practice has divided police. He also talks with an Indiana family left grieving after a former cop gun traveled all the way to their neighborhood from halfway across the country — and claimed the life of a loved one.
The episode, produced in partnership with CBS News and Stations, is an adaptation of “Shot by a Civilian Wielding a Police Gun,” an investigation co-published by The Trace and its partners on May 16. The episode also includes a segment from “The Gun Machine,” a podcast produced by WBUR in partnership with The Trace. Listen to the episode and follow “Reveal” on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Transcript
Al Letson: From The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. It’s 2008. Alain Stephens is living in Dallas and about to start the police academy. He decides to buy a handgun.
Alain Stephens: Like many people who are about to undertake any sort of training, you want to go out and practice. So I put the word out that I was looking for a Glock. After a couple months, a friend comes through and says, “I found just the thing.”
Al Letson: Alain makes arrangements to meet with the guy.
Alain Stephens: I meet this dude in a parking lot, and in Texas, just like many other parts of the country, it is totally legal to just buy guns, no paperwork, cash straight up. So I buy this gun for $400. I’m looking at it and it is nice. When I asked the guy where it comes from, he says, “Hey, this thing came from a New Jersey police department.”
Al Letson: The police in New Jersey had sold it off when they were finished with it, and it ended up in Texas.
Alain Stephens: I’m sitting there looking at that gun and I’m saying, “I’m clean. I’m a good guy, but what if I wasn’t? What would happen if this gun ended up in the wrong hands? And how bad would that look for a police department?”
Al Letson: So what happened to that gun — and that question?
Alain Stephens: I kept that gun, and I would go on and use it throughout the police academy. I’d use it as a police officer, all the way into a journalism career, but in the back of my mind, it always haunted me with that question, just how often these guns were getting in the hands of criminals.
Alain Stephens: As Alain transitioned from being a cop to being a journalist, this question stuck with him. Back in 2017, when he was a new reporter, Alain did a story for Reveal where he interviewed a retired ATF agent named Scot Thomasson, who’d done some crazy undercover work in his career. One time Scot posed as an arms trafficker and was cutting a deal with a neo-Nazi who robbed a drug cartel.
Scot Thomasson: He sold me a Smith & Wesson revolver, a big, chrome, shiny handgun revolver. It’s kind of an old school firearm, but I do notice there’s a San Diego Sheriff’s Department symbol on it.
Al Letson: So he called the department wanting to find out how one of their pistols wound up with drug dealers.
Scot Thomasson: And there was a long silence and pause on the phone and I said, “I’m calling to find out if this was stolen, if there’s some crimes associated with it or the set of circumstances why I’d be in possession of this firearm.”
Al Letson: It was one of many weapons the Sheriff’s Department had sold off to help pay for new ones. It’s a practice that Alain was discovering police departments do around the country — and it made him want hard numbers. How often do these guns show up in murders, robberies, and assaults?
Alain Stephens: What if I told you I was going to string that thread together to find out how many sold police guns ended up in crimes? What would you say to that endeavor?
Scot Thomasson: Good luck. Good luck.
Al Letson: Today, we’re going to talk about the gun statistic that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives tried to keep from Alain — and us — for years. We filed public records requests. They ignored them. Reveal sued the ATF, but they wouldn’t give us the number. We kept pushing. The case went to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled the ATF had to give us the number. It’s taken us seven years, but we can now tell you that a staggering number of weapons meant to protect communities are ending up in the hands of criminals. In collaboration with our partners at The Trace and CBS News, we’ve been able to piece together the journey of some of those guns from the police departments that sold them to the crime scenes where they ended up. Alain Stephens has the story.
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Alain Stephens: 52,529. That’s the number we worked so hard to get. Between the years 2006 and 2021, that’s how many former police guns were recovered in crime scenes. These numbers include guns lost or stolen from the police as well as ones they’ve sold. The ATF didn’t give us any information about the crimes. The Trace and CBS’s data teams had to figure that out by filing records requests from police departments and cross-referencing serial numbers, makes of guns, and other bits of information. It took us almost two years sifting through that information to eventually find the story of Cameron Brown.
Candace Leslie: That’s one of my favorite pictures. He was creative …
Alain Stephens: This is Candace Leslie, Cameron’s mom. When we meet, she’s at home with her mother, Maria. They’re flipping through old photos of her son, Cameron. He’s wearing a uniform.
Candace Leslie: Here’s the one with his ROTC uniform from school.
Maria Leslie: We are a military family. His aunts and his uncles were in the service, in the Air Force and the Army and Navy.
Alain Stephens: They told me Cameron planned on joining the military just like his grandfather. When Cameron was 19, he got a job at FedEx and moved into his very own apartment.
Candace Leslie: He moved into a little studio. It wasn’t far from us. I was happy with the place. It was calm. It was quiet.
Alain Stephens: But this was 2021, a record year for gun deaths in the U.S., nearly 50,000 people. Things were especially bad in Candace and Cameron’s hometown of Indianapolis, and one day, that violence would come to their front door.
Candace Leslie: I got a call when I left church. All I heard was his girlfriend. She was like, “Cameron, Cameron. He won’t get up. He won’t get up.” When I got there, everything was taped off. When I asked which kid was deceased, because I heard that there was three people involved in what happened, they wouldn’t tell me. So from the time they told me to the time the coroners came out, I stayed there. They told me to go home because this could take a lot. They told me to go home because this could take a lot, and I told them I wouldn’t leave. The chaplain came, and they told me to sit in the car because it was cold, but sometimes you’re numb so you can’t even feel everything outside. He finally showed me a camera picture and it was him.
[Newscast: Metro Police tonight investigating a deadly shooting on the northeast side of Indianapolis. Police say the victim was a man, but they don’t have his age …]
Candace Leslie: One more gun not only changed my life, it changed my whole family’s life. That’s what one gun on the street did. It changed our lives forever.
Alain Stephens: Just two months before Cameron’s death, the state launched a specialized task force, a tactical team whose mission, among other things, was to get guns off the street.
[Newsreel: In our top story here, hundreds of illegal firearms off the streets now after being seized by the Indiana Crime Guns Task Force …]
Alain Stephens: While the Indianapolis Police Department was quick to tout its successes in tamping down street crime in the community, when it came to talking to Candace about her son’s killing, the department had very little to say.
Candace Leslie: I felt like he was just another number on somebody’s board and everybody’s keeping, counting track of numbers going up or down for the year. I felt like they forgot all about us. They got our hopes up, made us feel like they were on our side. Nobody talks to you after that day. That’s it.
Alain Stephens: To this day, information about what happened that night is scarce, and the investigation is still open, but my co-reporters and I were able to piece together important details about the gun involved in Cameron’s case. You see, it wasn’t some AK-47 sold out of a trunk. It wasn’t a ghost gun made by a cartel trafficker or a grandma’s shotgun stolen out of her closet. In fact, it was a type of gun that police don’t want to talk about at all — their own. The Glock 21 pistol involved in the killing of Cameron Brown was once owned by a sheriff’s department 2,000 miles away in Stanislaus County, California. And it didn’t just walk away either. It was sold, legally, to a gun distributor and was one of 600 weapons off-loaded by the Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Department between 2019 and 2023. It’s a fact that Cameron Brown’s family would’ve been robbed of — if we hadn’t sued the ATF for data.
Alain Stephens: When I heard you say Cameron was a statistic, I don’t know. It broke my heart. He’s not a statistic. He, to be honest, is the key to this investigation.
Candace Leslie: I didn’t know anything on this level as far as the firearm that was involved. Yes, it surprises me, but now it makes sense. It’s making sense to me now why I couldn’t get answers, why nobody wants to call me back.
Alain Stephens: But here’s the thing, getting answers about where crime guns come from wasn’t always a secret. Trace information, data that shows where a gun came from, used to be public, available on a $20 CD-ROM back in the nineties. That included thousands of police weapons that had been sold off and showed back up at crime scenes. It was happening all over the place. Gang murders in New York. A homicide in St. Louis. A white supremacist used one to fire on a daycare center. In 1998, The Denver Post estimated that nationally, police guns were found in the hands of criminals three times a day. But this is something the gun lobby could not have. They pushed Congress hard to shut down the public’s access to trace information, and Congress did in 2003, forever hiding the sources of guns that are being used in crimes.
Scot Thomasson: It’s a Glock 19. It’s completely empty. It’s safe.
Alain Stephens: After we learned that more than 52,000 cop guns had been plucked up at crime scenes across the country, we reconnected with Scot Thomasson, the retired ATF agent.
Scot Thomasson: I basically turn.
Alain Stephens: He’s now a consultant for a company called SafeGunLock.
Scot Thomasson: So are you telling me that since we last spoke, 52,000 former police guns have been recovered in crimes?
Alain Stephens: Yeah, essentially I’m saying that since we last spoke, they finally gave me that number. The courts said that the ATF had to hand over that number.
Scot Thomasson: That is absolutely the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. It goes beyond the pale of absurdity to think that departments and officers who every day put their lives on the line to protect the community, and those firearms are actually in the hands of criminals, which may have to face another policeman, with taxpayer dollars funding these crime guns, is absolutely ridiculous.
Alain Stephens: The Trace and CBS News surveyed 200 state and local law enforcement agencies and found that more than two-thirds had resold guns between 2006 and 2024. Records from 67 of those agencies showed they had collectively resold more than 87,000 firearms over the past two decades. 87,000. ATF data shows the number of police guns winding up in crimes is on the rise, with annual cop gun recoveries doubling over a 15-year span. For Scot, an agent who has worked undercover arms trafficking investigations and has seen cop guns floating in the wild, the solution is simple.
Scot Thomasson: Police chiefs and sheriffs need to implement policies immediately that forbid the resale of any duty weapons and mandate they be destroyed.
Alain Stephens: He says, for one, police should never be so cash-strapped that they’re forced into doing this.
Scot Thomasson: I think it’s a two-part program. One is the funding needs to be right-sized and accurate and fulfilled, and on the other side is they need to have just a hard and fast policy we’re not going to do this.
Alain Stephens: But not all law enforcement sees it that way. We went to Indianapolis to speak to the city’s police chief, Christopher Bailey, about the gun that killed Cameron Brown. He refused to speak to it directly as the case is still open, but he tells us that he sympathizes with the victims under his watch, especially after learning from us that Cameron was killed with a gun once owned by law enforcement.
Christopher Bailey: I’m heartbroken for the family. It’s one thing to lose a family member by a violent means, and when you find out that happened as well, I’m sure it adds to their grief. I’m sorry for that.
Alain Stephens: But when it comes to arming its 1,700 sworn officers, Indianapolis PD jumped into the business of trading off old guns for new ones.
Christopher Bailey: I can’t remember the last time that we’ve done this. It’s been several years, but we sell them back to Glock. They give us a credit for whatever it is, then they apply that to the next set of weapons, is my understanding.
Alain Stephens: Chief Bailey says he would consider changing the policy if the community asked him to.
Christopher Bailey: If they’re OK with simply sawing them in half and then removing the trigger mechanisms, then that’s something we can explore.
Alain Stephens: It’s something Cameron Brown’s mother absolutely wants the department to change.
Candace Leslie: I don’t know a lot about law enforcement, but I thought they’re supposed to be destroyed when they’re not using them anymore. I don’t want to watch another teen die without saying something. I just want my voice to be heard.
Alain Stephens: But the gun that was involved in Cameron Brown’s death didn’t come from Indianapolis. It came all the way from the Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Department near Modesto, California. Jeff Dirkse is the county sheriff. He says when it comes to selling guns, it’s not a question of crime, it’s a question of math.
Jeff Dirkse: Let’s say a new Glock costs $600 and we can sell them to them for $250. It’s just a credit to us, and that saves the taxpayer money, because it’s all funded by taxpayers’ funds.
Alain Stephens: Dirkse says the equation is simple. The sale of old weapons offsets the cost to buy new ones. In his eyes, the impact of recycled police weapons is a drop in the bucket when you look at just how easy and available guns are in the U.S.
Jeff Dirkse: I don’t think it’s going to change anything. When I look at these crimes of violence that occur across my community with a gun, the vast majority of them are stolen.
Alain Stephens: Which on the national level is not true. In fact, for years, study after study shows the majority of guns used in crimes are obtained legally through dealers. The savings Dirkse is talking about pales in comparison to the cost of gun violence. According to researchers at Harvard Medical School, between healthcare spending, lost productivity, and other costs, gun violence drains more than half a trillion dollars a year from the U.S. economy. In the case of Cameron Brown, the sheriff says he feels for the family, but despite the weapon originating from his department …
Jeff Dirkse: My organization had nothing to do with it. It’s that criminal who did this. It’s a legal transaction. If I had legally sold my old used patrol cars, and somebody uses that in the commission of a crime, is that our responsibility? I would say no.
Alain Stephens: A lot of the police departments we surveyed that resell their weapons also make a big deal about getting guns off the streets of their communities, boasting gun busts on social media and hosting things like firearm buybacks. But when confronted with the fact that their weapons are ending up in crimes, many departments are ambivalent. Part of that stems from an ideology that when it comes to acquiring the latest and greatest equipment for police officers, the ends justifies the means.
Michael Sierra-Arévalo: It shocks me, but it doesn’t surprise me.
Alain Stephens: This is Michael Sierra-Arévalo. He’s an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin and has spent years studying police culture. Arévalo says part of the reason police are so concerned with arming themselves with the newest technology and equipment is because of something he calls the danger imperative, which coincidentally is the title of his new book. The idea that if an officer isn’t safe, then everything else in policing breaks down.
Michael Sierra-Arévalo: The danger imperative is a lens, a filter that is centered on the preoccupation with violence and the necessity of ensuring officer safety at all times.
Alain Stephens: It’s that preoccupation with violence that makes getting weapons a top priority among the police no matter what the cost, even if it means selling off old guns that could later end up in crimes.
Michael Sierra-Arévalo: What we’re seeing here in this shoulder shrug from departments about selling guns to private dealers is just one manifestation of how you can justify a seemingly illogical, even counterproductive outcome on the grounds of officer safety, on the grounds of needing to provide better armament to your officers, of making sure they have the latest and greatest.
Alain Stephens: Many police departments also argue that, technically, they aren’t selling their old guns to the public. They use middlemen, licensed gun dealers. With the gun linked to Cameron Brown’s death, the Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Department used one such middleman, LC Action Police Supply in San Jose. From 2005 to 2023, LC Action acquired over 3,000 firearms from 11 different law enforcement agencies. Then they sold those guns to anyone looking to buy. We obtained the ATF records on LC Action’s operations, and they paint a troubling picture. In the same period, they racked up 30 violations of federal firearms laws. We’re talking a list of things such as failing to report suspicious sales, to straight-up not conducting background checks. LC Action declined to participate in this story. While many gun stores didn’t want to speak with us, some did.
Mark Major: We got a big shotgun over here. Want to do a shotgun?
Alain Stephens: This is Mark Major. He owns 2-Swords Tactical & Defense, a gun dealer in Metro Atlanta.
Mark Major: Every now and then I’ll get a call from my reps saying, “Hey, we got a bunch of police Glock 22 trade-ins for a great price. They’re all in good shape if you’re interested.”
Alain Stephens: He says, at any given time you can find gun distributors hawking some police department’s retired batch of weapons.
Mark Major: I own one personally. I mean, I bought one years ago. It was one of my first Glocks that I bought. It’s still running. I think for most people police trade-ins are a great way to get a gun that’s in good condition. Most people, if they’re looking for a deal, that’s something that they definitely would consider.
Alain Stephens: Still, Mark says one of his daily duties as a reputable dealer is to sniff out risky customers, no matter what kind of gun he’s selling, to make sure that none of his products end up as one of the more than 400,000 guns recovered yearly in crimes in the U.S.
Mark Major: There’ve been quite a few instances where we’ve had to back out of a transaction. One comes to mind where a few years ago a guy came in here. He saw the firearms on my website. He wanted to buy two. I was like, OK. As I went through the process, I kept noticing he’s very, very specific about the serial numbers on those guns.
Alain Stephens: It’s weird stuff like that that made Mark deny this dude and countless other suspicious customers from getting a gun. When I brought up that, in a 15-year period, 52,000 former police guns had been used in crimes, Mark was shocked — and it gave him pause. There are law enforcement agencies that think it’s a bad idea to resell their used guns. Federal law enforcement, like the FBI and DEA, are banned from doing it and destroy all their old guns. The Cambridge Handbook of Policing warns against the practice. Some police we spoke to said they wouldn’t do it for a variety of reasons. From Seattle’s former police chief who is afraid one could be used to hurt one of their own officers.
Adrian Diaz: I surely don’t want to put those guns out into the community. I’m trying to figure out ways that we can be responsible as a police department, but also responsible to our community.
Alain Stephens: To Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where the chief thinks it’s just counterproductive.
William Penn Jr.: I think that would probably make every law enforcement agency and the officers sick on their stomach.
Alain Stephens: Many other police departments looked at us crazy for even asking if they do such a thing, but most police departments refuse to comment, and so did government officials. We reached out to local and state lawmakers, members of Congress, the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, and the ATF. They were happy to discuss gun buyback programs and what to do about assault-style weapons like the AR-15, but when it came to what police should do with their guns: silence. For Cameron Brown’s family back in Indianapolis, that silence is deafening.
Maria Leslie: A big, huge piece of our puzzle is missing, and we can’t replace it with anything.
Alain Stephens: That’s Cameron Brown’s grandmother, Maria Leslie. For her, what happened to Cameron will never sit well.
Maria Leslie: My grandson was in his own apartment complex. He lived there. He had a right to be there. He paid rent there. He should not have been murdered there, especially with a gun that traces back all the way to the California police department’s coffers. That’s an atrocity against justice right there, and then we wouldn’t have this information if you all hadn’t reached out to us. We wouldn’t have known. It brings a little bit of, it’s not closure, but it is like at least we’re not lost in the sauce.
Alain Stephens: Lost in the sauce. To be honest, many more families like Cameron Brown’s are lost, too. We found other cases in the course of our investigation. Another firearm from the Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Department was recovered in San Antonio in connection with the shooting of a 15 year old. Police executing a search warrant for a murder suspect in Buffalo, New York, pulled drugs, body armor, and a handgun out of a backpack, a handgun originally owned and later sold by the Kentucky State Police. In Indianapolis, when cops arrested a man for allegedly choking a woman, he was armed with a pistol once owned by the Iowa State Patrol. On average, nine cop guns are recovered at crime scenes every day. So the next time you hear of that bank robbery, that drive-by, that rifle recovered from America’s next mass tragedy, ask yourself just where did that gun come from?
Al Letson: As we were wrapping up this show, there was a big development from Indianapolis. After a version of this story aired on CBS News, Police Chief Christopher Bailey issued an executive order changing his department’s policy. Indianapolis Police will no longer sell their used firearms.
Our story was from Alain Stephens, a reporter for The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom that covers gun violence. The Trace and CBS news were partners in our story. It was produced by Pamela Kirkland.
In a moment, the bank robbery decades ago that made law enforcement decide it needed to arm up.
[Ed Mireles (former FBI agent): We were armed with six shots, which was a standard-issue law enforcement weapon. We came up against a couple of guys. They were carrying an assault rifle with 30-round magazines. I’m telling you, the individual who has a 30-round magazine has an advantage over an individual who has a six-shot revolver.]
Al Letson: You’re listening to Reveal.
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Al Letson: From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. Over the last four decades, American police departments have increased their arsenals dramatically. They say they need to stay ahead of armed criminals on the streets. Buying more weapons means spending more money, and while some departments help pay for new firearms by selling off their used ones, most police funding comes from local, state, and federal tax dollars. Law enforcement is now one of the gun industry’s largest customers and a key element of their business model. This next story is adapted from “The Gun Machine,” a podcast from WBUR and The Trace, which was hosted by our reporter for this hour, Alain Stephens. He begins with the story of a crime that convinced police they needed to arm up.
Alain Stephens: It’s July 7th, 1984.
[Ronald Reagan: My fellow Americans, I’d like to talk with you today about a subject that’s been a priority since this administration’s first day in office: fighting crime in America.]
Alain Stephens: The Reagan administration is in the height of its war on drugs.
[Ronald Reagan: Too many Americans have had to suffer the effects of crime while too many of our leaders have stuck to the old, discredited liberal illusions about crime — illusions that refuse to hold criminals responsible for their actions.]
Alain Stephens: And the front line of that war? South Florida. A once-gilded tourist destination, Miami has turned into the No. 1 hub of narcotics trafficking. Police have new tools to tackle narcotics — civil asset forfeiture — allowing police to redirect seized property into financing its counter-narcotics operations. With Miami-Dade County averaging over 450 homicides a year in the early ‘80s, authorities claim that drug addiction is leading to more shootings, burglaries, and an epidemic of bank robberies. Between 1985 and 1986, there is at least one armored truck or bank robbery every day in Miami — and as many as five a day.
[Newsreel: Two men pulled up to a Loomis armored car in the (inaudible) parking lot on Southwest 97th Avenue. They fired on the car with machine guns trying to blast the doors off, but to no avail.]
[Newsreel: The Miami Bank, a daring standoff between a robber and a police officer, the suspect’s submachine gun misfires. No serious injuries.]
[Newsreel: The ‘80s are bringing a return to bank robberies, up 25 percent this year in South Florida. But the gangsters of the past aren’t back. These crooks are different.]
Alain Stephens: The number of robberies prompts the federal government to create a special unit. The FBI’s C-1 Bank Robbery Squad. Out of all the daily heists, the squad becomes laser-focused on one particularly violent duo: Michael Lee Platt and William Russell Matix.
[Captain Arnold DeLuca: They’ve used shotguns, they’ve used machine guns. They show that they are professional and very dangerous.]
Alain Stephens: The men are military veterans — well armed, extremely aggressive, and persistent. When it comes to heists, they simply won’t take no for an answer. Months prior, they had darted around the city taking wild and violent runs on armored cars and banks. In October of the previous year, the two attempted to take over a Wells Fargo truck. They ordered the guard to freeze before fatally shooting him. Then, they fled in the ensuing gunfight with the remaining guards.
[Newsreel: A Wells Fargo truck picking up cash was raked by machine gunfire. The truck’s guards unloaded …]
Alain Stephens: Soon after, they pull a small bank job before taking yet another stab at an armored car. This time they target a Brink’s truck parked behind a bank, sneaking up on the guard and shooting him in the back with a shotgun. Then the two stand over the wounded guard to finish him off with their assault rifles.
[Newsreel: Either another robber or that same robber shot the courier two more times with what is described as an automatic weapon.]
Alain Stephens: Somehow the guard survives. Matix and Platt would brazenly return to that very same parking lot months later, only to rob the bank. Law enforcement starts throwing out dragnets and investigations into DMV records. But while local police wait on new leads, the FBI decides to act on a hunch.
[Dispatcher: Attention Area 2 units: The FBI is staking out the banks along the highway from 183 Street to 112 Street, 920.]
Alain Stephens: On the morning of April 11, 1986, the eight agents of the C-1 squad set up a traffic stop in a neighborhood where Matix and Platt had been spotted.
[Agent on radio: We believe that it’s the black Chevy. We’ve been looking for it. We believe it may be planned to be used in an armed 29 in the next few minutes.]
[Dispatcher: Now en route behind a black Chevrolet northbound on highway from 120 Street …]
Alain Stephens: They attempt to stop them. There’s a chase, and the pair lose control of their vehicle, ramming into a tree.
[Agent on radio: I believe they’re stopping.]
[Dispatcher: The unit stopping the vehicle?]
Alain Stephens: And that’s it. The outlaws are pinned in, outnumbered, and quickly surrounded by multiple agents of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency. And for that, Matix and Platt have one response.
[Dispatcher: County Police and Fire, do you have an emergency?]
[Caller: There’s some people shooting each other on 82nd Avenue and about close to 120th Street.]
[Dispatcher: They’re shooting at each other?]
[Caller: Yes.]
[Dispatcher: Attention all units for information: I have shots fired with machine guns at 120 Street, 82 Avenue, 937.]
[Caller: Multiple rounds of gunfire being fired down the street. Two cars are parked. There are people screaming.]
[Dispatcher: How many shots have you heard?]
[Caller: A lot.]
[Dispatcher: Huh?]
[Caller: Lots.]
[Dispatcher: OK, is anyone, Is anyone injured?]
[Caller: No, but they’re right outside my front door. They’re still blowing somebody away. There’s one guy laying down in the middle of the street. You better get some help out here in a hurry.]
[Dispatcher: They’re on the way, I assure you. They’re on the way. I need more information from you if you can supply it …]
Alain Stephens: William Matix is shot six times throughout the gun battle before going down. Michael Lee Platt, 12 times.
[Dispatcher: Officers down at 939 …]
Alain Stephens: But they take law enforcement with them.
[Dispatcher: 5521. Attention all units: reference the 330 officers down. Five rescues are en route at this time. Two subjects are in custody. Rescues en route already, 939.]
Alain Stephens: It is the bloodiest day in FBI history, leaving two agents dead and five more wounded.
[Newsreel: The two dead agents are identified as 53-year-old Benjamin Grogan, a 25-year veteran, and 30-year-old Jerry Dove, an agent for just four years …]
[Interview: You couldn’t really find a better guy if you lived a million years …]
[Interview: And thank God we have men and women who are willing to put their lives on the line for each of us every day.]
Alain Stephens: This shootout shocks the law enforcement community, the president, and everyday Americans, who are overwhelmed by a growing fear of violent crime. Even one of the robber’s own mother is shaken by the violence.
[Yvonne Emerick: What happened? I think his mind snapped. And I said, “I felt so sorry for the people down there, the FBI, their families. They was doing their job, and I know they had to do it. Somebody had to stop him. Bill was a Christian, and God only lets you go so far, and if you don’t stop, he’s going to bring you down.”]
Alain Stephens: Former FBI agent Ed Mireles was shot twice during the incident and is considered a hero for taking down the gunman. He says the FBI was simply outgunned.
Ed Mireles: We were armed with six shots, which was a standard-issue law enforcement weapon, and standard-issued shotguns. We came up against a couple of guys. They were carrying revolvers. One individual was carrying a shotgun, but his partner was carrying an assault rifle with 30-round magazines. I’m telling you, the individual who has a 30-round magazine has an advantage over an individual who has a six-shot revolver. We learned that lesson the hard way.
Alain Stephens: This sends cops nationwide scrambling. If the FBI could be outgunned, so could they, because just like the feds, many of them are carrying five- and six-shot revolvers. Months after the shooting, the Miami-Dade Police Department sends out a call to the gun industry: We need better guns. Other departments would soon follow.
Ed Mireles: Believe the word is a watershed event. That event broke the dam as far as law enforcement equipment, law enforcement training. I mean, it changed law enforcement — and it changed it for the better.
Al Letson: In a moment, a gun manufacturer most people had never heard of designs a pistol that becomes the weapon of choice for police and criminals. You’re listening to Reveal.
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Al Letson: From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. Law enforcement officials are in a panic after a shootout with two bank robbers in Miami leaves two FBI agents dead and five others wounded. It’s 1986, and departments around the country are convinced they’re being outgunned by criminals, so they put out a call to the gun industry for more firepower. Now, up until this point, police have been carrying revolvers made by American companies like Colt and Smith & Wesson. But as Alain Stephens, host of “The Gun Machine” podcast reports, this time it’s a little-known Austrian company that sees a business opportunity and sets its sights on the U.S. market.
Alain Stephens: The name would become synonymous with American gun culture.
Paul Barrett: And this was Glock.
Alain Stephens: Paul Barrett is a journalist who’s covered the gun industry. He’s reported extensively on how Glock first broke into the American market.
Paul Barrett: The guns are easy to use in that they have essentially no real safety that you have to think about turning on or off. It was new from top to bottom, and it was sort of pitched as the gun of the future.
Alain Stephens: But outfitting the police with the gun of the future would cost money. Luckily for police, ever since Nixon first declared the war on drugs in 1971, they’ve been able to tap into a new source of revenue: civil asset forfeiture. It allows them to seize cash, cars, boats, and anything related to drugs to finance their fight on crime. Miami PD orders 1,100 Glocks. Soon, police in Dallas, San Francisco, St. Paul, and Minneapolis follow suit. It doesn’t take long for this Austrian pistol to find its way into the holsters of American police officers nationwide. Police see it as the best way to fight back.
Paul Barrett: The perception was that they had been outgunned. That became the term of the moment: The police were outgunned. And into this environment came the Glock, this very different, foreign handgun alternative.
Alain Stephens: Gaston Glock — the man behind the gun bearing his name — first founded the company to sell curtain rods and knives. Then in the early 1980s, he got word that the Austrian military was looking for its next pistol.
Paul Barrett: And he said, “Well, I’ll volunteer. I’ll design a new pistol,” which made no sense to anybody since he had no background designing firearms.
Alain Stephens: But he is a master delegator and assembles a crack team to make his dream pistol a reality. And the end product is a half-plastic, mean little brick of a gun. It’s ugly, but very reliable and stupidly simple to use. Austria buys thousands, but when he first tries to break into the United States, Glock faces an uphill battle.
[U.S. Representative Ted Weiss: Plastic guns that can escape detection by current security devices can be used by terrorists to threaten innocent victims here in the United States and around the globe.]
Alain Stephens: Members of Congress claim Libyan terrorists are buying Glocks by the thousands. Political cartoons label the pistol “the hijacker special.” NYPD even bans issuing any Glock permits. Eventually, Congress passes a law targeting the Glock that would ban undetectable guns. The thing is, there’s no such thing. All guns are detectable by metal detectors and X-rays, including Glocks. So, it stays on the market, but it’s a tough market. Glock hysteria has already swept the nation, so the gunmaker needs a new strategy. Gaston Glock realizes he doesn’t have to win over the law, just law enforcement. And let’s just say he has a way with cops.
Paul Barrett: The company had a reputation in terms of entertaining police procurement near their facility in Smyrna, Georgia, outside of Atlanta, where a local strip club had a weekly sort of Glock-themed event.
Alain Stephens: Barrett says reps from Glock shuffle law enforcement officials to the Gold Club, plying them with liquor and strippers. It isn’t just big departments with deep budgets they put under their spell. Glock officials target smaller cash-strapped departments, too, allowing those cops to trade in their old guns for newer, faster-to-shoot, and quicker-to-reload Glocks.
Paul Barrett: Glock became an overnight millionaire and then ultimately a billionaire with private jets and homes in different places and all the rest.
Alain Stephens: Suddenly, Americans wake up and find Glocks everywhere. On TV shows. In music.
[Clip from “Ready to Die” by The Notorious B.I.G.: As I grabbed the Glock, put it to your headpiece.]
Alain Stephens: And in movies.
[Clip from “Die Hard”: That punk pulled a Glock 7 on me. You know what that is? It costs more than you make in a month. // You’d be surprised what I make in a month.]
Alain Stephens: Whether it’s a Glock or an old-style revolver, you might assume police always carried some sort of firearm, but it wasn’t always that way. In fact, before the 1900s, officers didn’t necessarily have a gun. They carried whatever they had — clubs and sometimes pistols or shotguns — and it was all personal property. It wasn’t until the 20th century that police departments decided to get more organized and made weapons standard-issue. For decades, that meant revolvers and shotguns. That is, until 1966 —
[ KTBC newsreel: The sniper was well-armed and apparently planned a long siege. He had two large jugs of water and a footlocker containing food and hundreds of rounds of ammunition.]
Alain Stephens: — when Charles Whitman, ex-Marine, climbs the University of Texas clock tower and, armed with an arsenal of weapons, proceeds to rain down gunfire. It takes police, deputizing local bystanders, an hour and a half before they stop Whitman. The public massacre comes at a time when law enforcement are under increasing pressure, responding to political assassinations, civil rights uprisings, and now mass shootings. From then on, mass shootings give police a license to stockpile their armories with new weapons and gear. In the ’70s, the UT Tower shooting would speed up the spread of SWAT teams.
Radley Balko: We’ve seen a huge increase in the number of SWAT teams across the country, in how frequently SWAT teams are used across the country, and why they’re used.
Alain Stephens: Radley Balko is a journalist and author who covers police militarization and civil liberties. He says to pay for those special units, the federal government starts setting aside money for them. In ’86, the Miami bank robbery shootout becomes the bloodiest day for the FBI and prompts cops to convert to semiautomatics. Then in 1997, the LAPD fights it out with armor-clad, machine gun-toting bank robbers.
[Newsreel: He’s firing at police who are across the street in a parking lot. Now, this is what makes me think he had body armor on because this is a guy who is almost nonchalant in the way he’s walking around.]
Alain Stephens: Major city cops ask for military rifles. In an early show of support, the Pentagon sends 600 surplus M16s to the LAPD. Then, in 1999, what was previously thought unthinkable, happens.
[Newsreel: Two gunmen are inside that school right now, so the exercise …]
Alain Stephens: Columbine.
[Newsreel: … but in the meantime, we’ve got some sound from students who are on that scene.]
[Interview: Again, the most severely we’ve heard is a girl who was shot …]
Alain Stephens: The school mass shooting solidifies the idea that every officer everywhere needs a rifle in his trunk. The active shooter threat is now born. Just when you thought the already established and deep pockets that the police couldn’t get deeper.
[President George W. Bush: I do not believe anyone could have prevented the horror of September the 11th, yet we now know that thousands of trained killers are plotting to attack us, and this terrible knowledge requires us to act differently.]
Alain Stephens: Balko says funding for law enforcement balloons to never-before-seen levels.
Radley Balko: Particularly after September 11th, the September 11th attacks in 2001, you get the Department of Homeland Security a couple of years later, and they started giving out grants to police departments across the country to buy militarized or military-grade equipment, ostensibly in the name of fighting terrorism.
Alain Stephens: The new source of funding gives arms companies a golden incentive to advertise to police, urging them to keep up with the threat of an ever-increasingly armed populace — a populace that these same gun companies simultaneously arm. The largest police departments start hiring full-time grant writers to help them tap into federal funding.
Radley Balko: These grants basically give rise to a cottage industry that exists to make this equipment for police departments in exchange for DHS money.
Alain Stephens: But small departments don’t have the resources to go after those grants. Alex Vitale, a professor of sociology and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College, says the gun companies stepped in to help.
Alex Vitale: Service providers, the weapons manufacturers, et cetera, figured out a way to work around that, which is that they provide grant writing assistance directly to police departments so that if you’re a small town police department and you are searching the web looking for material for your SWAT team, you will find, often on the website of the provider, grant assistance on the website. You go there and they’ll help write the federal grant for you because it means that you’ll get money to buy their products.
Alain Stephens: These grants and other outside funding sources come with very little oversight, so police are able to increase their firepower more or less under the radar.
Alex Vitale: We’ve had situations where city council members have no idea what weaponry the city is buying. They find out from activists or they find out because they see this stuff being used and they’re like, “No one ever ran this by us. We didn’t sign off on this.” It’s either buried in the budget or it’s coming through one of these independent funding sources.
Alain Stephens: Wherever the money comes from, for cops, the armament isn’t negotiable. They say it’s necessary.
Brent Stratton: You have to be able to stop the killing, and you have to be able to stop the dying, and you need to be able to do those together in as timely a manner as possible.
Alain Stephens: Brent Stratton is a cop and the president of the California Association of Tactical Officers. To their organization, it’s not if the cops need this type of equipment, it’s trying to put some rails on it, making sure officers act like a scalpel and less like a hammer.
Brent Stratton: There are things that the military has that law enforcement doesn’t have any business in being able to possess, but I don’t see that with rifles. I don’t see that with armored vehicles. These are things that are life-saving pieces of equipment that are used to help be able to save the people that we serve as well as the lives of officers.
Alain Stephens: But Balko says if that’s the goal, all these weapons aren’t helping police meet it.
Radley Balko: I don’t think that is safer for police. I think it’s more dangerous for everyone. I think it creates a lot of volatility and a very thin margin for error.
Alain Stephens: From the 1970s to 2014, the use of SWAT teams across the country increased by 15,000 percent. While these teams were created to respond to rare and extremely violent incidents, the bulk of daily SWAT teamwork has turned to search warrants and high-profile arrests. The decades of police militarization has been a boon for the arms industry, with some of the most influential gun companies making their fortunes on the backs of police. Kimber Manufacturing rode the wave, becoming the official pistol of LAPD SWAT, the OG tactical team. Rock River Arms climbed to prominence as the selected riflemaker for the DEA. LaRue Tactical would make an AR-15 so beloved that Texas Rangers now keep it in their hall of fame. With the most well-armed police force ever, we’re all a lot safer, right? Right? According to Washington Post data, police shootings on civilians have increased for the last seven years, and the end effects on crime are the most expensive, aggressive, and readily armed police force in the history of our country. While it may be true that nonviolent crimes have fallen over the decades, homicides and shootings have not. In 2021, gun homicide rates weren’t just the same as they were at their peak in the late ’80s. They were higher. And officers aren’t safer, either. According to a 2018 Princeton study, the use of SWAT teams doesn’t increase officer safety or reduce crime. It only drives a wedge in community trust. Nearly every study points to aggressive policing as a failure in providing public safety. Despite us knowing this, the chances of reform are slim. See, in the national conversation about police, people typically think there are three stakeholders: the police, politicians, and us, the people. But I need to remind you, as a journalist who covers this system, there is another player, the police industrial complex. It’s the arms developers, it’s gun companies, it’s accessory makers. It is their business to maintain the status quo, and right now, business is good.
Al Letson: This excerpt of “The Gun Machine” was reported by Alain Stephens and produced by Grace Tatter. You can listen to the entire series wherever you get your podcasts.
Pamela Kirkland produced this week’s episode with help from Steven Rascón and Aisha Wallace-Palomares. Taki Telonidis edited the show.
Thanks to our collaborators at The Trace: Champe Barton, Brian Freskos, Craig Hunter, Miles Kohrman, Olga Pierce, and Will Van Sant.
At CBS News: Chad Cross, Stephen Stock, Christopher Hacker, Amy Corral, Nicole Vap, John Kelly, Jose Sanchez, and Grace Manthey. At “The Gun Machine,” Emily Jankowski, editor Kevin Sullivan, and executive producer Ben Brock Johnson.
Special thanks to our indomitable general counsel, Victoria Baranetsky, for her work on the lawsuit against the ATF for gun data.
Nikki Frick is our fact checker. Our production managers are Steven Rascón and Zulema Cobb.
Score and sound design by the dynamic duo, Jay Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs, and Fernando “My Man, Yo” Arruda.
Our interim executive producers are Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis. Our theme music is by Camerado Lightning.
Support for Reveal’s provided by listeners like you and the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, and the Hellman Foundation.
Reveal is a co-production of the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX.
I’m Al Letson, and remember, there is always more to the story.
