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This week’s episode: All the President’s Pardons

A major legal victory in the quest to track guns 

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives knows how often police guns turn up in crimes. For years, they just wouldn't tell anyone the answer. But now they will have to share that data. 

Some police departments sell their used pistols and shotguns to pay for new weapons. In early 2017, Reveal Investigative Fellow Alain Stephens wanted to know where the  resold police weapons from Texas’ largest departments wound up. He filed a public records request with the ATF to find out. The ATF responded by saying that former police guns were indeed ending up in crimes — but refused to provide any additional details. 

Reveal’s legal team sued the ATF to compel them to turn over the data on police guns at crime scenes. Led by General Counsel Victoria Baranetsky, Reveal has argued for the last three years that statistical aggregate gun trace data should be made available to reporters because of an exemption in a 2003 amendment that ushered in a new era of secrecy at the ATF. This month, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals gave Reveal — and reporters all over the country — a big win. As Alain reported: 

These reports, which detail the provenance of crime guns, including their first owner and point of sale — live in a massive database, and present an incredible resource for journalists, policymakers, and regular citizens who want to know how guns move from the marketplace to crime scenes.

The court went further, ruling that the  government’s duty to disclose records extends to databases. 

As Vickie, our attorney, said: “Without access to these electronic banks of information that are swiftly replacing paper records, FOIA would become irrelevant and government accountability would be at risk.”

The court agreed. “Were we to agree with ATF that the results of a search query run across a database necessarily constituted the creation of a new record, we may well render FOIA a nullity in the digital age,” wrote Judge Kim Wardlaw in the majority opinion. 

We still don’t know how many police guns wind up involved in crimes. But the ruling this month opens the door to answering this question. This is a win for journalists and, hopefully, a step toward more accountability and transparency at the ATF. 

In the Field 

A few months ago, we teamed up with PBS NewsHour to report on a deadly situation in Nicaragua: Cattle ranchers raising beef for export to the United States have killed Indigenous people and stolen their rainforest land, in order to turn it into cow pastures. 

Beef is big money in Nicaragua. It’s Nicaragua’s number one export and the country has shipped 33,000 tons of it  to U.S. importers this year alone, who in turn sell meat to retailers like Target, Safeway, and Walmart. As ranchers have expanded,  they have been moving onto indigenous land and threatening indigenous communities with violence.  

“That is going to cause us ethnocide. And as Indigenous people, we are going to disappear,” said Lottie Cunningham, an Indigenous leader and attorney in Bilwaskarma, a Miskito community in northeastern Nicaragua

But now there’s some important news for the communities that ranchers have attacked. After a decade of lax legal enforcement, internal government documents obtained by Reveal show that the government is enlisting the national police and local municipalities to stop cattle illegally raised on stolen lands or in protected biospheres from reaching the country’s slaughterhouses. 

The documents show that the Nicaraguan government is going to start enforcing a law that was passed in 2011 but that has never been fully enforced. It requires ranchers and beef producers to track cattle from birth to slaughter. Cattle ranchers and slaughterhouses are supposed to tag each calf with a unique tag and ID number. Illegal ranchers now will be denied these tags, and therefore cut out of the market -- if the government follows through on fully enforcing the law.
 

Reveal Recommends 

Mallory Newman is an associate producer at Reveal. She’s part of a team making a documentary about how resource scarcity will impact our future.  

Listening: “The Condor” EP by Dust Follows is a recent fav and very nice to relax to at the end of the day.  

Reading: I just finished Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin which was a nice light read for some often heavy days. 

Watching:  I’ve been re-watching Stranger Things “together” (virtually) with my friend and texting which has been a nice way to stay connected.   

You can keep up with Mallory on Twitter @manewms.  

Do you have feedback for Reveal? Send it over! This newsletter was written by Sarah Mirk, who will share your thoughts with the team.