Efficiency in evidence? Snoqualmie Police Department reduces, reuses seized weapons

Published 5:15 pm Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Ever wondered where can you legally take brass knuckles in Washington state? A steel plant is a good place to start. What might sound like a punchline is a new reality for the Snoqualmie Police Department’s updated evidence destruction technique.

Janelle Knight, the department’s records evidence technician, took brass knuckles and eligible guns to the Nucor Corporation steel plant, along with staff from a handful of other King County police stations for the first time on Friday, March 6.

Her fiery workday involved 18 firearms from Snoqualmie’s cache, $100,000 worth of melted steel and 3,100 degrees. The steel from the melt is repurposed into rebar at no cost to the police department.

“It was a learning process as far as what can and cannot be melted,” Knight stated in her Snoqualmie office. “The guns have to be unclaimed with no owners. We always run the serial number, make sure it’s not reported stolen, and then obviously, ….how it came into our possession is a big part of it, as well.”

Destruction-eligible guns have to fit strict requirements. They must be intentionally turned in from owners or confiscated by the police department, with no known owners and never used in a crime, as most of those firearms are kept for integrated ballistic identification system testing.

Citizens who are eligible to reclaim their property are sent a letter and given 60 days to respond. If they don’t meet this deadline, the police department is legally allowed to melt it. If their background doesn’t check out, they’re allowed to sell the gun or sign it over to someone else.

“Any time a gun comes back into our possession, before we let it go anywhere, I do a background check on that person and make sure, one, that they’re eligible, and two, if they’re not eligible, they can sign it over to somebody who is,” Knight explained.

The department has never destroyed guns in the past. Instead, staff reused them in the department’s basement shooting range or sold them and used the money to invest in ammunition, again, for the shooting range. Knight brought the idea to the department after working on an evidence purge during her four years working dispatch in Issaquah.

“I had that knowledge and then when I came here, we had all these firearms,” she stated. “I was already planning on doing a lot of the big case research and clearing out stuff, because a lot of it’s really old and I learned that we had never done a gun melt and never destroyed guns. I know the storage capacity in the evidence room; as stuff comes in, stuff’s got to go out.”

An image of the 3,100 degree incinerator after guns from the Snoqualmie Police Department’s crowded evidence room were dropped in.