Guns turned in to buybacks turn up at crime scenes, joint investigation shows

CHICAGO (WGN) — The Chicago Police Department has used gun buybacks to get thousands of firearms off the street, but at least two of them have resurfaced at crime scenes, a joint investigation between the Illinois Answers Project and the Chicago Sun-Times found.

One high profile case involved a Glock that was turned in at a St. Sabina Church event in 2023.

“When that gun was on the desk, and it was surrounded by police officers, police officers were looking at it, and talking about good this Glock looked, and then the Glock disappeared. And then one year later it turned up in the hands of a teenaged boy, and that is the center of the story we wrote that takes a longer look at buybacks in Chicago,” reporter Casey Toner with the Illinois Answers Project said Friday on the WGN Evening News.

A second instance involved a gun that was turned over in 2007 but appeared five years later at a deadly police shooting in Cicero.

Toner said the Chicago Police Department has acknowledged the problem but did not say “how they planned to improve the process.”

Watch Toner’s full conversation with WGN’s Patrick Elwood and Lourdes Duarte in the video attached to this article.

The investigation is published on the websites of the Illinois Answers Project and the Chicago Sun-Times.