A Gun Deemed Too Dangerous for Cops, But Fine for Civilians

This story was published in partnership with The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. Sign up for its newsletters here. Shortly after dark one day in September 2022, police officers Yang Lee and Charles Laskey-Castle arrived on Milwaukee’s west side to investigate a car abandoned on the sidewalk. Lee knelt to examine the driver’s side floorboard as Laskey-Castle stood behind him. Then Lee rose—and his holstered gun fired a bullet into his partner’s leg. The shooting was captured on body camera footage, and it was at least the third time in three years that a Milwaukee officer’s SIG Sauer P320 pistol had allegedly fired without a trigger pull, according to lawsuits and police records. The following month, the Milwaukee Police Department moved to replace its P320s with weapons from another manufacturer. “There is no higher priority than the safety of the people who protect our city,” Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson said at an October 2022 news conference announcing the switch. “Unexplained discharges, they have injured people. That’s completely unacceptable to me.” At the same event, Milwaukee’s police chief revealed that, to offset the cost of the new weapons, the department would be reselling its P320s to a gun dealer. Soon, the old P320s—deemed too dangerous for the city’s officers—would be available for purchase by civilians. The decision in Milwaukee follows a pattern that has been repeated in cities across the nation as police departments reevaluate their use of the P320 amid mounting concerns about the weapon’s safety. A 2023 investigation by The Trace and the Washington Post revealed that the P320 has gruesomely injured scores of people who alleged in lawsuits that it has a potentially deadly defect. SIG Sauer denied these claims. Over the past two months, The Trace surveyed more than 60 law enforcement agencies whose officers once used the P320. More than 20 of those agencies—including police departments in Oklahoma City, Denver, and Chicago—have moved to prohibit the gun because of fears about unintentional discharges. Twelve agencies said they resold their P320s to the public after determining the model was unsafe for officers to use. Cumulatively, these departments sent at least 4,000 P320s back into the commercial market. “If the primary function of law enforcement is to protect and serve, one would think that returning a problematic weapon to the public is not particularly consistent with that mission,” Jonathan Jacobs, director of the Institute for Criminal Justice Ethics at New York’s John Jay College, told The Trace. “The ethical issues here are very, very plain.” A Milwaukee police spokesperson said, “The trade-in was a cost-savings for the department.” SIG Sauer declined to comment on the specifics of this story and directed questions to p320truth.com, a website it created about the gun. The gunmaker previously has denied that the P320 is capable of firing without a trigger pull and cited accounts of unintentional discharges with other firearms as evidence that such issues are neither uncommon nor suggestive of a defect. Concerns about the P320 surfaced recently in Washington, where in February, the state’s Criminal Justice Training Commission banned the P320 from its facilities, citing an “abundance of allegations of un-commanded discharges occurring around the country.” Because the commission hosts mandatory training for police officers, its decision pressured law enforcement agencies across the state to reconsider their use of the P320. The ban came after at least two shootings involving P320s among Washington law enforcement. Last year, a Kitsap County sheriff’s deputy’s holstered P320 discharged while she apprehended a suspect in a grocery store, according to body camera footage obtained by local media. Nobody was injured, but after the shooting, the Kitsap County Commission offered to fully fund the purchase of different guns plus the cost of destroying the old P320s to remove them from circulation. The Sheriff’s Office declined the offer, and in March, it said it would be reselling more than 200 P320s to a dealer. “It seemed like the fiscally responsible thing to do,” Kitsap County Undersheriff Russ Clithero told The Trace. The office received roughly $300 per resold weapon—more than $60,000. One of the most popular handguns in America, the P320 has been used by officers at more than a thousand law enforcement agencies across the country. But according to police records and lawsuits, as of April 23, at least 120 people have alleged that their P320 fired without the trigger being pulled. Those shootings resulted in more than 110 injuries and at least one death. Dozens of people have sued SIG Sauer over P320 discharges. Several cases have been dismissed, and the company won a jury trial in 2022. More recently, however, two juries have ruled against SIG Sauer, awarding more than $13 million in damages. After the most recent verdict, in November, the national Fraternal Order of Police sent a letter to SIG Sauer requesting an accounting of measures taken by the company to address widespread concerns about the P320. “The officers who rely on your products must have absolute confidence in the safety and performance of their weapon,” the letter read. The Trace contacted 69 law enforcement agencies for this story and 41 responded. A total of 16 confirmed that after issuing the P320 to officers, they switched to a new pistol out of concern about the P320’s safety. Four others had acknowledged publicly that their departments switched pistols because of safety reasons but did not respond to The Trace. The Pasco County Sheriff’s Office in Florida resold more than 800 P320s after three officers survived incidents in which they say their P320s discharged, though nobody pulled the guns’ triggers, records show. “The trade-in value was necessary to facilitate the transition to the Glocks we currently use,” a spokesperson for the Sheriff’s Office said. “We cannot speak for what actions the vendor took with the weapons after we traded them back.” The Police Department in Bridge City, Texas, resold its P320s after one of its officers claimed she was shot in the groin by a holstered gun zipped inside her purse, a police report shows. The bullet missed her spine by inches. R.D. Bergeron, the assistant police chief of Bridge City, said the department kept the gun involved in the shooting. “The last thing we would want is anyone, officer or civilian, to get hurt due to it firing uncommanded,” Bergeron said. Law enforcement agencies generally resell weapons for budget reasons. Used police guns are popular among gun buyers because they’re relatively inexpensive and often in good condition. Resales have drawn criticism from law enforcement experts and gun violence researchers, who have argued that introducing used police weapons to the civilian marketplace risks fueling crime. At least 52,000 police guns had been involved in crimes—including homicides and other violent assaults—since 2006, according to an investigation by The Trace, CBS News, and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting. While that tally includes guns lost by or stolen from police, many of the firearms were resold by law enforcement. Ed Obayashi, a deputy sheriff in Modoc County, California, and a national police ethics expert, said reselling an allegedly defective gun poses an added threat to public safety, even if it never slips into criminal hands. For this reason alone, he said, departments should not resell P320s if they believe the guns to be defective. “There are situations in law enforcement where you’re going to have to do the right thing, even if it’s going to cost you financially,” Obayashi said. In Laredo, Texas, the Police Department resold about 500 P320s after an officer experienced an unintentional discharge, officials said. The officer was not injured, but investigators concluded that his gun had fired “without the trigger being pull…