A state bill introduced Monday would require California law enforcement agencies to keep track of their guns and establish a reporting procedure for when police lose them.

State Sen. Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo, said he introduced the legislation in response to investigations published this year by the Orange County Register and Bay Area News Group revealing that many law enforcement agencies make little or no effort to inventory their weapons and that officers frequently lose their firearms – some of which end up on the street.

“The guns…fall into the hands of criminals,” Hill said. “The public will be protected much better when we account for law enforcement guns.”

The stories on lost police guns noted that there are no state or federal laws requiring police agencies to account for their weapons and few agencies voluntarily do so.

The Department of Justice’s Automated Firearms System attempts to act as a national registry for law enforcement weapons, but agencies are not required to report when a registered gun is lost or stolen. Also, officers don’t have to register their privately-owned guns even if they frequently carry them in the line of duty.

Hill’s bill, SB 22, would require police agencies to inventory all their firearms, to take annual counts of their weapons and to report to the national registry when guns go missing. It also calls for officers to register personal firearms if carried on the job. Officers who fail to report lost weapons would be disciplined.

The media investigations found that since 2010 at least 1,000 firearms had been lost or stolen from police agencies in California. Missing weapons included handguns, shotguns, high-powered rifles and at least one grenade launcher, among others. Some lost police weapons later were connected to crimes. In Northern California, a gun lost by a federal park ranger was used in a suspected murder.

In Southern California, theft accounted for about one-third of the missing guns. Many of the thefts came because officers left weapons unattended in vehicles, inside center consoles, in the glove box or stashed in gym bags behind the passenger seat.

In September, Gov. Jerry Brown signed another bill authored by Hill requiring law enforcement officers to lock up their guns left in unattended vehicles or face fines of $1,000.

That same month, at the Register’s prodding, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department created a computerized database to monitor its missing weapons, something the agency previously had not done. That search found that more than 100 handguns and rifles were gone.

“(Police agencies) are large organizations,” Hill said of the need for statewide legislation. “They’re busy and this is just another bookkeeping issue that they’d rather not deal with.”