The Los Angeles Police Department is investigating whether members of its elite SWAT unit took advantage of their assignments to purchase large numbers of specially-made handguns and resell the weapons for steep profits, according to a report released Friday by the independent watchdog overseeing the department.
The LAT suggests that this “could be a violation of federal firearm laws and city ethics regulations”. I am unfamiliar with ethics regulations in LA, so I will refrain from comment on that. I am not sure what federal firearm laws would have been violated, since private sales between individuals are not illegal under federal law. (They may be under California law; I am also not an expert on California gun laws.) The LAT is also apparently unclear on what regulations and federal firearms laws were violated:
Regardless of whether the LAPD has a policy governing gun sales by officers, [Inspector General Alex] Bustamante noted that “the purchase of firearms with the intent to immediately transfer the weapon to a third party may violate city ethics regulations and federal firearm laws.” The report did not specify which regulations and laws may have been violated.
But getting back to the story, this isn’t the first go-around at this particular rodeo.
Suspicion about the guns first arose in 2010, when the commanding officer of the LAPD’s Metropolitan Division, which includes SWAT, ordered an inventory of the division’s firearms, the report said. The officer responsible for conducting the count discovered that SWAT members had purchased between 51 and 324 pistols from the gun manufacturer Kimber and were “possibly reselling them to third parties for large profits,” according to the report.
“between 51 and 324”? Could you be a little more vague in your count? In any case, LAPD SWAT, according to the LAT, only had about 60 members.
Kimber sold the guns, which bore a special “LAPD SWAT” insignia, to members of the unit for about $600 each — a steep discount from their resale value of between $1,600 and $3,500, the report said. The unique SWAT gun branding was first made several years earlier, when the department contracted with Kimber for a one-time purchase of 144 of the pistols.
$600? Daymn! I know Kimber’s had issues in the past few years, but you offer me one for $600, and I’ll be on that biatch like an anaconda on blood orchid serum.
(We watched that over the weekend. Two word review: annoyingly competent.)
(Also: “between $1,600 and $3,500”? That’s a $1,900 difference there, Sparky. If the comments in the LAT and Kimber’s website are to be believed, the pistol in question is the Custom TLE II, which has an MSRP of $1,054 without the LAPD SWAT markings.)
Neither the officer relieved of duty, the others suspected of being involved, nor the person who conducted the inventory were interviewed for the investigation, and no attempt was made to determine how many guns had been purchased from Kimber, Bustamante wrote. In the end, the department concluded that it had no policy governing such activity, and so closed its investigation, according to the inspector general report.
So that’s the first investigation, which the LAT makes sound half-assed. Bustamante’s investigation is the second one:
Because the initial investigation was so lacking, little is known about the gun sales. Bustamante’s report, which will be presented to the L.A. Police Commission on Tuesday, was based on the initial, substandard inquiry and so could not answer basic questions about the allegations, including how many officers were involved, the number of guns sold and when the sales were carried out.
And:
The department’s poor job investigating the alleged SWAT gun sales was all the more notable, Bustamante wrote, because of the way it treated the officer who uncovered the gun purchases during the inventory. When one of the SWAT team members under suspicion accused him of improperly discussing the investigation with others, the department opened a separate inquiry into the claim, producing a 257-page report that dwarfed the 39-page file on the gun sales. The officer was suspended for five days.