Gun-running case spotlights D.C.’s out-of-state crime guns and a required tracing report not posted since 2024

By Staff Reporter

WASHINGTON — Federal prosecutors this week charged five people with running guns from North Carolina into the District, two of them licensed by the city as special police officers. The case lands on a pipeline that the District’s own records have described for years: most guns police recover here were bought somewhere else, and the largest flows come up Interstate 95.

But anyone trying to follow that pipeline through the city’s own official reporting will hit a gap. A D.C. law passed in 2024 requires the mayor to send the Council, and post online, an annual report on recovered crime guns by Feb. 1 each year. The Metropolitan Police Department’s page for that report, as of Thursday, offers a single edition: the one covering 2023, sent to the Council in March 2024. The Washington Inquisitor could not find editions covering 2024 or 2025 on the department’s site.

This analysis brings together the indictment announced Wednesday, MPD’s recovery totals, the 2023 tracing report and published federal trace data to show what the public record says about where D.C.’s crime guns come from, and what it leaves out.

The North Carolina case

On Oct. 20, ATF agents working with the Make DC Safe and Beautiful Task Force arrested five people on warrants from a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of North Carolina, according to a joint announcement from U.S. Attorney Jeanine Ferris Pirro of the District of Columbia and U.S. Attorney Ellis Boyle of the Eastern District of North Carolina. Four were arrested in Maryland and one in Raleigh.

The 13-count indictment charges conspiracy to traffic firearms, firearms trafficking and making false statements to a federally licensed gun dealer, the offense commonly called a straw purchase. Prosecutors say the co-conspirators supplied “upwards of approximately 40 firearms” to people in the District, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia and St. George’s, Grenada.

The case, United States v. Agee, No. 5:26-cr-00218, was filed under seal on Oct. 14 in federal court in Raleigh, according to the public docket, and prosecutors have since moved to unseal it. The announcement and docket do not say how many of the roughly 40 guns were recovered in D.C. or whether any has been linked to a shooting here. The Inquisitor has asked both U.S. attorney’s offices.

According to the announcement, the indictment charges:

Source: U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, Oct. 21, 2026.

The trafficking and conspiracy counts carry up to 15 years in prison and the false-statement counts up to 10, prosecutors said. An indictment is an accusation. All five defendants are presumed innocent, and the docket did not list defense lawyers as of Thursday morning.

Prosecutors said Ms. Young and Ms. Whitaker “hold valid Special Police Officer licenses in the District of Columbia.” Special police officers are armed private security officers with limited arrest powers. According to MPD’s Security Officers Management Branch, the city’s licensing agency has processed those applications since 2014, with MPD’s branch giving final sign-off. That agency is now the Department of Licensing and Consumer Protection. The announcement does not say whether either woman was working as a special police officer during the alleged scheme or whether the licenses are under review. The Inquisitor asked MPD.

“Gun-running networks do not respect state lines, and neither does our determination to stop them,” Ms. Pirro said in the announcement. Mr. Boyle said: “If you are making sham purchases to illegally run guns in Eastern North Carolina, we will find you and prosecute you.”

How many guns D.C. police recover

MPD publishes yearly totals of recovered firearms on its District Crime Data at a Glance page. Recoveries jumped in 2022 and have eased since, though the department warns that a change in record systems makes the last two years not directly comparable with earlier ones.

Source: Metropolitan Police Department, accessed Oct. 22, 2026. *MPD says that starting in 2024 it moved to the FileOnQ evidence management system for reporting firearm recoveries, so 2024 and 2025 totals “are not directly comparable to prior years.”

Even with that caveat, the District has recovered close to 3,000 guns a year for four straight years. That is about eight a day.

What the one published tracing report shows

The only edition on MPD’s Firearms Tracing Data Report page is a report Mayor Muriel Bowser sent to Council Chairman Phil Mendelson on March 21, 2024. An emergency public-safety act passed in late 2023 required it. The report says its data come from ATF and reflect “primarily MPD firearm recoveries.”

It counted 3,135 firearms recovered in 2023, including 407 ghost guns, the untraceable privately made firearms often assembled from kits. Nearly half of all recoveries, 45 percent, came from the Sixth and Seventh districts, the two police districts east of the Anacostia River.

Source: MPD Firearms Tracing Data report, March 21, 2024.

On the question the law most directly asks, where the guns came from, the report gives a single paragraph. Among guns ATF traced, it says, “more than twice as many came from Virginia (701) as Maryland (298).” It then lists the other states that sent more than 50.

Source: MPD Firearms Tracing Data report, March 21, 2024. States with more than 50 traced guns only.

Together, those five states account for 1,533 traced guns, and Interstate 95 runs through all five. That is the same corridor the North Carolina indictment describes. The law also asks for a breakdown by manufacturer, model and last known point of sale. The report says only: “This information is tracked by ATF but is not available for public dissemination.”

The trafficking signals in federal data

Federal trace data point to the same pattern. A May 2026 fact sheet by the gun-safety group Everytown, which analyzes ATF’s published trace data for the District, says law enforcement recovered and traced 3,106 guns in connection with D.C. crimes in 2023. That is slightly fewer than MPD’s recovery count, because not every recovered gun is traced.

One signal investigators watch is “time to crime,” the gap between a gun’s first retail sale and its recovery by police. ATF treats a short gap as an indicator of possible trafficking. Among the 2,178 D.C. traces of 2023 where that gap was known, Everytown’s analysis found:

Source: Everytown Research & Policy analysis of ATF, “Firearms Trace Data: District of Columbia – 2023.”

The same fact sheet cites ATF’s National Firearms Commerce and Trafficking Assessment as finding that from 2017 to 2021, only 5 percent of crime guns recovered in D.C. were found with the person who first bought them. Everytown, which advocates for stricter gun laws, estimates that 1,032 crime guns recovered in D.C. in 2023 were likely trafficked by people who bought them from licensed dealers. That figure is Everytown’s estimate, not an official count.

The North Carolina indictment, as prosecutors describe it, matches that profile: people allegedly lying on federal forms at licensed dealers so that guns could be moved north to buyers who were not on the paperwork.

The missing reports

The 2023 report was required by a temporary emergency law. The Council then made the requirement permanent in the Secure DC omnibus. The law, now D.C. Code § 7–2510.16, took effect June 8, 2024. It says that “by February 1 of each year, the Mayor shall submit to the Council and post on the Mayor’s website” a report using the prior year’s data: total recoveries, recoveries by police district, ghost guns, and, “to the extent possible,” the origin and point of sale of the guns along with an analysis of purchase patterns.

Sources: D.C. Code § 7–2510.16; MPD Firearms Tracing Data Report page.

The Inquisitor’s search covered MPD’s report page and the department’s site. It does not establish that the reports were never sent to the Council; they may have been filed elsewhere or not posted. The Inquisitor asked MPD, the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice, and the Council’s Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety whether reports covering 2024 and 2025 were submitted, and where they are posted.

The gap matters because the annual report is the only regular, District-specific public account of where guns recovered here were sold. MPD’s year-end page gives totals but no sources. ATF’s state-level trace tables give sources but no police-district detail. The North Carolina case shows how traffickers’ routes can shift. Without the 2024 and 2025 reports, the public cannot tell from District records whether Georgia, the Carolinas or anywhere else has gained or lost ground as a source since 2023.

What we asked

Asked whether the 2024 and 2025 tracing reports exist, an MPD spokesperson said that “annual gun recoveries are reported in our annual reports” and pointed to the department’s annual reports page. The response did not say whether the tracing reports required by the law had been prepared or submitted.

The Inquisitor sent questions to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia; the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of North Carolina; MPD; the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice; the Council’s Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety, chaired by Ward 2 Councilmember Brooke Pinto; Everytown; and the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions. We asked how many guns in the North Carolina case were recovered in D.C., what the special police officer licenses mean for the case, whether the 2024 and 2025 tracing reports exist, and how outside researchers read the trace data. MPD responded, as noted above, and the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions referred the questions to Dr. Daniel Webster. This story will be updated with any other responses.

About the data

MPD’s annual recovery totals come from its District Crime Data at a Glance page, accessed Oct. 22, 2026. The police-district and source-state figures come from the March 2024 MPD report, which draws on ATF data for 2023 and may include some recoveries by other agencies. Time-to-crime figures and the trafficking estimate are Everytown’s analysis of ATF data, as published in its May 2026 fact sheet. The five-state total is the Inquisitor’s sum of figures in the MPD report. Defendant and charge details come from the Justice Department announcement and the public federal court docket. For earlier reporting on gun prosecutions in the District, see the Inquisitor’s analysis of sentencing requests by Ms. Pirro’s office.

Photo: Metropolitan Police Department cruisers in Washington. Tony Webster via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.