A tiff between the ATF and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Reno has left crime-stopping teams without the proper equipment to conduct undercover gun operations and gun buyback programs in northern Nevada, the Reno Gazette Journal reports.
Since ATF agents left the Nevada office, local and regional police have been unable to access surveillance equipment, federal wiretaps and money for gun buybacks.
“Not having an active ATF office has impacted our ability to conduct gun investigations because we don’t have the resources or manpower to do them safely,” said Sgt. Scott Tracy, head of the Sparks Police Department’s Crime Suppression Unit. “And the operations the feds were doing — they were taking illegal guns off the streets.”
The ATF largely abandoned its Nevada post after Assistant U.S. Attorney Sue Fahami sad in September 2011 that her office would not prosecute anymore cases until unnamed issues were resolved.
“The whole thing was a travesty,” said Reno Police Lt. Scott Dugan, head of his department’s Street Enforcement Team. “Losing that expertise has had a great impact.”
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