944 LOST LAW ENFORCEMENT GUNS
In the Bay Area and across California, cops and state and federal agents lose firearms at astonishing rate
Nine-hundred forty-four guns. From Glocks, Sig Sauers and Remingtons to sniper and assault rifles, some equipped with grenade launchers.
They used to belong to law enforcement officers across California, but a Bay Area News Group investigation found hundreds of policeissued weapons have been either stolen, lost or can’t be accounted for since 2010, often disappearing onto the streets without a trace.
A year after a bullet from a federal agent’s stolen gun killed 32-year-old Kate Steinle on a San Francisco pier, this 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 highpowered assault rifle in the trunk of a taxi.
The tally includes Colts, Rugers, Smith & Wessons, a Derringer, a .44-caliber Dirty Harry hand cannon and a small snub-nosed revolver called a “Detective Special.”
In all, since 2010, at least 944 guns have
disappeared from police in the Bay Area and state and federal agents across California — an average of one almost every other day — and fewer than 20 percent have been recovered.
Little attention had been paid to the issue before Steinle’s highly publicized death. But at least 86 weapons were snatched from officers’ vehicles between January 2010 and last June’s smash-and-grab burglary of a U.S. Bureau of Land Management ranger’s gun recovered after Steinle’s shooting. Police have not determined who stole it, but an illegal immigrant is charged in her killing.
“You just can’t leave a gun alone in a vehicle,” said retired FBI Agent Jim Wedick. “You just can’t do it. It has to be in a compartment, or in chains an inch thick wrapped around a lead box, because, God forbid, someone gets hurt.”
But even after Steinle’s death, law enforcement agents have continued to leave guns available in their cars: Four FBI guns have been stolen from vehicles in the Bay Area this year, including three in Benicia; Salinas police had three stolen from cars in a six-week period in April and May. And a San Jose Police cadet resigned on the eve of becoming an officer after his gun was stolen from his car in late October while he was in the Benihana restaurant at Cupertino’s Vallco Shopping Mall.
Scope is ‘staggering’
The thefts are revealed in records obtained from government agencies in one of the most comprehensive examinations of missing police guns of its kind. While last year’s highly publicized killings of Steinle and Oakland muralist Antonio Ramos brought attention to the tragic consequences of stolen police guns, the scope of the problem has been far less clear — until now.
The numbers “are staggering,” said Frank Pitre, an attorney representing Steinle’s parents, Jim Steinle and Elizabeth Sullivan, in a federal lawsuit over their daughter’s death. The BLM is one of three defendants.
This news organization’s investigation also uncovered that a gun stolen from a Tracy cop in 2010 was used to kill a man in Contra Costa County four years later, and a now-retired Piedmont police chief’s gun stolen in 2012 was used in a San Francisco gang shooting that year.
Many departments have struggled to keep track of weapons. Oakland police, for example, lost track of 370 weapons since 2011, including 30 this year that later turned up. It’s unclear how many other guns could be missing from local departments that haven’t bothered to audit their inventory of weapons.
While police agencies documented the majority of missing guns in this news organization’s analysis as lost or unaccounted for, 192 were listed as stolen.
“This needs to stop,” said state Sen. Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo, who is sponsoring legislation that would make it illegal in California for a cop to leave a gun in an unattended car unless it is locked inside a hidden compartment or secure case.
Officers become complacent with their weapon, because they are so used to it always being there, Hill said. “They don’t take it as seriously as they should, and what the effects of it could be if it gets lost to the wrong hands.”
Late last year, after Steinle and Ramos were killed, U.S. Rep. Mark DeSaulnier, D-Concord, urged President Barack Obama to issue an executive order requiring all federal guns left in parked vehicles to be locked down. The White House took no action, DeSaulnier said in an interview.
Regulations for gun storage in vehicles vary widely across the more than nearly 100 federal agencies that employ armed agents, DeSaulnier said. He said he will soon introduce legislation to make regulations uniform by requiring lockable compartments in any parked vehicle where a government gun is left.
He is also considering adding a requirement that any police department in the country that receives federal funding have strict policies in place about safeguarding guns in unattended vehicles.
“It was very staggering for me to find out that there is no set, universal policy at all for state, local and federal government,” DeSaulnier said. “That’s crazy.”
Thefts from vehicles
The records that show from where a theft occurred highlight a distinct pattern: 60 percent were swiped from vehicles, almost always from a personal car or truck where a gun was left vulnerable, this news organization found. In March 2014, a gun stolen from the vehicle of a Tracy police officer was used in the death of Jesus Orozco, 34, a laborer and father of two, in a dispute over a woman that a prosecutor called “a little love triangle.”
Three men were arrested, but not charged. Orozco had been carrying an air gun that looked like an assault weapon, and the men raised self-defense claims, said Contra Costa deputy district attorney Mary Knox.
A cousin of Orozco said his family never knew a police gun was involved. The gunman wasn’t charged with possessing the officer’s stolen weapon because “we have to prove that he knew the gun was stolen,” Knox said.
New Tracy police Chief Larry Esquivel, the former San Jose chief, said “the circumstances were truly unfortunate for everybody involved. I can’t stress enough the importance of proper storage (and) care of any weapon.”
Running the gamut
Across the state, the officers whose guns were lost or stolen run the law enforcement gamut, from ICE and DEA agents to forest rangers, alcoholic beverage control officers, sheriff’s deputies, game wardens, welfare fraud investigators and parks police. A CHP officer’s gun was even stolen from his wife after she took it without his knowledge.
Losing a gun — especially when it was left vulnerable — is asleep. That gun was recovered when the pimp accidentally shot himself in the leg during an altercation.
That’s not the only bizarre discovery of an officer’s stolen gun: In 2014, a Washington woman driving through a Seattle suburb was pounding on the rattling glove compartment of a used car she just bought when it popped open and out fell a .40-caliber Sig Sauer pistol that had been hidden in the air-bag compartment. Three years earlier, a thief had swiped it from a Stockton police officer’s car.
Topping the list
San Francisco police and the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office, which includes Dublin police, topped local agencies with 10 stolen weapons each. All of the sheriff’s gun thefts were swiped from vehicles, including one where a deputy’s personal car flipped over in an accident and a passer-by snatched a bag from the wreckage as the injured officer waited for help.
Alameda County Sheriff Greg Ahern said the thefts led him to issue an order earlier this year mimicking one by former San Francisco police Chief Greg Suhr that prohibits officers from leaving weapons in vehicles overnight.
Former Piedmont police Chief John Hunt could have used the same policy.
He drove home to Danville after work on March 9, 2012, and as was his custom, left his briefcase in his car — with his Sig Sauer pistol inside. Hunt, who now lives in Idaho, said his wife didn’t want the gun in the house as a precaution because they have children.
The next morning, poof, the briefcase was gone.
Hunt said he instantly “felt sick. We lived in a safe community. The (driveway) gate was locked. It was so embarrassing.”
Four months later, two San Francisco police officers were driving along Mission Street shortly after midnight when they heard four or five gunshots, saw people scattering, then ran down a gang member who had tossed a weapon under a car.
When police ran that gun’s serial number through a statewide database that traces weapons, up popped the Piedmont Police Department. It was Hunt’s gun. Piedmont police were notified of the recovery, but Hunt, who had retired weeks earlier, said he was never told the gun was found until a reporter called.
In a phone interview he said he was surprised this news organization had traced the gun to the San Francisco shooting.
“At least it’s off the streets,” Hunt said. “I am so relieved. At least no one was hurt.”
Discipline appears rare
Strong discipline would help curb thefts, experts say, but it isn’t clear whether such discipline happens; California’s secretive police personnel laws often make it difficult to find out what happened to cops who left guns unsecured.
A few cases show punishment is far from severe.
When an unidentified Napa police officer left an assault weapon in the trunk of a taxi — the driver later turned it in — the discipline was a written reprimand, Chief Steven Potter said. When another cop had a on Page 11