The Seattle Police Department is currently under investigation by the Office of the Washington State Auditor due to the mysterious disappearance of nearly two dozen firearms over the past eight years. The department’s internal audit in August revealed the unsettling fact that 23 firearms have gone missing since 2017, with no clear indication of their whereabouts.
Patrick Michaud, a spokesperson for the department, expressed the department’s commitment to rectifying the situation. “We’re going to do our best to ensure that we do better,” Michaud said. “Until we find them, we’re going to keep looking for them.”
The missing firearms, which include Glock pistols, a modified training shotgun, a woodstock shotgun, and a rifle-and-pistol combo, were reported to be from the department’s training units, firing range, or individual officers. This situation underscores the department’s ongoing struggle to maintain the security of its weapons.
The missing firearms have been registered in the National Crime Information Center. This means that the Seattle Police Department will be alerted if the firearms surface elsewhere.
This is not the first time the department has faced issues with missing firearms. In October 2019, a teenager managed to walk out of a training building with an officer’s handgun. The teenager, who had just attended a youth education program run by the police, discarded the weapon off a bridge. The police were able to recover it three days later.
Following this incident, a former police chief called for an internal review, which revealed several weaknesses in the department’s method of storing weapons at training facilities. In one case, firearms were stored in a metal cabinet intended for office supplies.
The 2021 report also indicated that the training storage system did not meet the standards required of civilian gun owners, let alone the police. Despite purchasing 20 padlocks after the 2019 incident, the department still failed to properly secure the weapons.
In response to these issues, the Seattle Police Department has since altered their audit schedule and is exploring other methods to track firearms. “Could be a QR code, could be a sticker of some sort, could be something else entirely,” Michaud suggested. The department has also reduced the number of access points at the training facility and provided officers with individual lockers for storing guns.