Arming criminals in the Bay area
The Mercury News surveyed law enforcement agencies in the San Francisco area and found that at least 944 LEO weapons have gone missing in the last six years. We’re not talking a few handguns here, 27 of the weapons were scary and black, 15 were sniper rifles, 12 were grenade/tear gas launchers and one was a submachine gun. I guess we’re lucky that police don’t get crew-served machine-guns and mortars. According to the Mercury News, 192 of those weapons were stolen and 35 were misplaced. The rest just can’t found;
[T]his news organization surveyed more than 240 local, state and federal law enforcement agencies and discovered an alarming disregard for the way many officers — from police chiefs to cadets to FBI agents — safeguard their weapons.
[…]
Their guns have been stolen from behind car seats and glove boxes, swiped from gym bags, dresser drawers and under beds. They have been left on tailgates, car roofs and even atop a toilet paper dispenser in a car dealership’s bathroom. One officer forgot a high-powered assault rifle in the trunk of a taxi.
Funny how I’d get the vapors if my weapon was even out of reach, but the trunk of a taxi? Really? Someone should tell Congress and they can stage a sit-in until the police in the SF area can always account for their weapons. It’s not that hard – even my dumbest private could do that.
Maybe the worst part is that it took the death of Kate Steinle in a public place by an illegal alien before anyone gave a tiny rat’s ass about stolen law enforcement weapons. I wonder if anyone is encouraged to check nationwide, you know, while everyone is so concerned about gun control.
Category: Police
“Some animals are more equal than others”
Do some indepth examinations of employees! They have someone selling weapons, or giving them out, most likely with gang affiliations! imho
I’d say a quick search of some LEO’s property would turn up most the the ones that “went missing”.
That is 3 weapons a week…unaccounted for. No need to be alarmed.
Gun Nutz are probably snatching them up in dark alleys for pennies on the dollar.
Ammo? Any word on missing ammo? In the wrong hands simply pulling the trigger can cause PTSD from what I understand. Maybe some officers are just hiding them to avoid the emotional trauma.
Nail on the Head!
Guess we’re just lucky none of those “Atomic Assault Rifles” went missing!
With shoulder things that go up, and non-reloadable clips.
Do we lock the bay area down and do police calls till we find them?
Exactly.
Everyone in San Francisco needs to get on line and walk the whole city until those firearms are found.
No one gets secured until that gets done.
Since it’s San Fransico, they can even hold hands and skip while their doing police call.
They’ll all have to be issued crying towels and PTSD counseling in the event that they find one and actually have to SEE a real firearm (oh the horror!).
Here in my neck of the woods, the same thing happened a dew months ago. A regular audit of a city’s armory showed weapons missing. An officer had to sign a weapon in an out of the armory, but still,no on could find all of them.
Eventually they got the list down to a few M-16’s that were missing as the weapons were found in trunks of cars, mislabeled (a Glock handgun listed was actually sniper rifle) When the police chief was asked if the M-16 were semi or fully automatic, he would not answer, leaving most people to believe they were automatic. (A fact later confirmed by a Sunshine Law request.)
They finally found the last M-16 in the closest of an officer who obtained the weapon by some method that was never disclosed.
No police officer was ever disciplined or reprimanded for the weapons being unaccounted for. The Feds, however, who require the audit ever year, banned the City from its weapons purchase program for 6 months.
Oooooooo…..THAT really hurts.
Gun shops and gun owners made statements to the press as to how they have to account for and take care of their weapons yet the police got a pass on their misplacing weapons.
I really don’t think that LEO’s losing weapons and showing poor care of those weapons is uncommon. It is just that we as citizens seldom hear about it.
“Uhm Captain, so here’s how it went. No shit, me and my partner were at Dunkin Donuts ya see. We left our weapons on the front seats cause folks there at 2AM don’t like ’em. The windows were down cause it was hot that night and when we came back…Damn…our service weapons were gone. I mean gone! Who would have stole a police weapon out of a police car?”
“Okay you two, that’s twice this month you’ve lost a service weapons. Once more and I’m putting you both on report. Now get down to the armory and get a new issue and this time, try to keep them in your holsters at all times. You might need those things. And guys…guys…stay safe out there.”
The SJ Merc did a fairly good job on this story, but seemed to miss a couple of additional aspects.
Up until around 1980, there weren’t nearly as many government agencies who were armed. State and federal parks people, for example, tended to see their ranger job not as actual law enforcement, but as a matter of keeping Yogi and Boo Boo from stealing pic-a-nic baskets. A lot of them weren’t cops; they were biologists.
Flash forward 30 years, and there are now in California almost 100 federal agencies alone who have people authorized to carry weapons. This doesn’t even count state and local which probably follows a similar trend. Personally, I have a hard time understanding why, say, state DMV needs to have investigators who carry.
When Kathy Steinle was killed last year, there was a lot of discussion about law enforcement weapon loss, and some interesting anecdotal evidence that the auditing system has a lot of loopholes. For example, if a LEO loses a department-issued weapon, it’s not unknown for the LEO to replace it as an out-of-pocket expense so that the loss might not show up for years if ever. Another example is that if departmental policy allows a LEO to carry a personal weapon in lieu of a department issued one, there might not be any paper trail at all.
I was surprised to find that the Government Printing Office and the Library of Congress each have their own independent police departments.
Yes. Just like many agencies consolidate pay systems through USDA, an simple executive order to consolidate all federal LE under FPS (they all are trained at FLETC anyway) would simplify things. Unfortunately then I suppose folks like GPO, Smithsonian, LoC would have to actually justify the size of their LE branches.
My mother in-law was secretary for the IRS. The bosses tried to get her to an MP5 range just in case. She refused the offer.
944.
NINE-HUNDRED AND FORTY-FOUR.
That’s niner fower fower.
Un-b-f*cking-leivable.
If any one of us lost a weapon, let alone an M16(!) we would be under a bright light in handcuffs. AN M16! They just cavalierly say, No big deal it will turn up. Huh?!?!? If a civilian Class III holder lost an M16 he would be in JAIL!
These are the people who should only have weapons? Like the NYPD and their 17% hit rate in shootings. The FBI Agent in Massachusetts who leaves an M4 and a Sniper Rifle in his CAR! And it is stolen! No discipline , nothing!A fed gets his gun stolen and it is used by an Illegal to kill someone. Yup, We need to give up our guns because we are “Protected”.
AAARRRGHHHH!!! Too much Coffee today!
“I have good news and bad news, sarge.”
“What’s the good news?”
“It wasn’t loaded this time.”
“Aw shit. You lost another one?”
The residence of retired LEO is where I suspect many of the approximately 700 that just vanished.
However, this reminds of the early 90s scandal involving weapons missing from arms rooms after a few were discovered in LA police raids leading to a close look at on-hand weapons.
The result is that some were simply sold off to domestic criminal arms traffickers. A few soldiers were implicated and charged but the overall extent of the issue was never fully investigated since it was easy to force soldiers out during that era of cuts and many commands just removed some of these soldiers the most expedient way as possible disrupting the ability for investigators to interview all involved and determine the total extent of the corruption.
There was also an international arms trafficking scandal involving soldiers a few years prior as well.
Don’t forget the endless truck loads of spare parts being sold of my armorers (depot level) a few years ago.
I have to admit that I can understand any issued weapon being ‘lost.’ But a SNIPER RIFLE?? As far as I know, those are kept in an armory or a safe until they’re needed, aren’t they? They don’t go home with the department sharpshooter, do they? How and when did they get lost? I’m more curious than concerned, because I don’t ever recall a sniper rifle being used in a crime (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.)
That is fucking unacceptable. Why is that tolerated?
Well, we know where one was. A young lady was murdered by an illegal alien with it
Maybe it is all that pot out there in Stoner Land.
Back in 1986, during the annual Division-level field exercise, a soldier in my unit “misplaced” an M-1911A1 pistol.
The chain of command went Ape-Spazz.
We were in lockdown, daily gear and person searches, CID interrogations, mine-detectopr sweeps, concertina wire enclosure, “welcome to KZ TaroLeaf” mode, Hazing squared, for about 4 days until a kid went skinny-dipping in 32 degree mud-bog ponds and found that worn-out .45.
All over -one- barely-functional worn-out WW2 relic.
I cannot understand why we do not hold law enforcement officers to something resembling a standard of accountability, with some teeth for non-compliance.
Hanging onto your freaking sidearm and credentials is a good start. Maintinaing control and accountability fo long arms woudl be nice.
If the average 18 year-old dip-stick E-2 can manage this with minimal supervision, why not the 21+ year-old sworn lawdog?