revealengagement

That's a great question. There is some research suggesting that domestic violence rates are higher among police than the general population. This is an area we'd love to explore more. But I'm not aware of a comprehensive accounting of domestic abuse among police.

Great question. Thanks very much. Our investigation focused on people who were convicted of felonies and misdemeanor domestic violence offenses that disqualified them from having a firearm. While some may have gotten their guns from other sources, some offenders had guns -- that were known to judges and law enforcement -- but police, prosecutors and judges never took these guns away. Then these abusers used their guns to kill their partners.

From 2017 through 2020, Reveal identified at least 110 intimate partners and others who were fatally shot by offenders using guns they weren’t allowed to possess under federal and, in some cases, state law.

After falling for decades, domestic violence gun homicides hit a 26-year high last year. And the # of people who shot and killed their intimate partners last year jumped a whopping 25% in 2020 compared with the previous year.

A total of 1,788 people were shot and killed by intimate partners last year, according to FBI data analyzed for Reveal by James Alan Fox, a criminologist and criminal justice professor at Northeastern University. Two-thirds of these victims were women.

Yes, in some cases we examined, victims of abuse were aware their abusers had a gun -- and reported that to police -- yet police, prosecutors and judges failed to take offenders' guns away. Then offenders used these guns to kill their partners. In one case in Alabama, a police chief returned the gun of a man facing a domestic violence charge. This man then used this gun to shoot his ex-girlfriend and her daughter.

Our reporting found that while we have federal and state laws on the books that prohibit felons and domestic abusers from possessing guns, around much of the country, these laws don't lay out specific procedures for offenders to relinquish their guns or have them seized. So there's little enforcement. It's an open secret that our gun laws operate on the "honor system," where we trust offenders to disarm themselves.