Police Can Track Bullet Casings Like Fingerprints Now

2017 is only halfway over,
and in the United States it’s been a bloody six months:
there have already been more than 8,000 shooting deaths,
and more than 16,000 gun-related injuries,
according to the watchdog group Gun Violence Archive.
In Chicago,
the violence has been so intense that President Trump announced at the end of June
that he’s sending in the feds—
about 20 ATF agents armed with ballistics technology
that can help solve gun crimes.
It’s a tool that already seems to be working—
in the places where police have the resources, and commitment, to embrace it.
— 83-11, we have a pursuit.
— Location?
— Eastbound on California, towards Reading...
— This vehicle is on the way to sell the informant heroin in her car.
See ‘em?
Got ‘em.
When I came on, like,
if you recovered a firearm, it was a big deal.
When somebody got shot, it was a big deal.
But now, like 25, 28 years later…
— Mother fucker!
— …it happens multiple times a night.
— Hands down by your ass!
— In 2015, gun crimes here reached a peak—
479 were committed that year.
The number dipped in 2016,
but already this year the force has seen gun crimes tick up again.
— I don’t think I’ve seen a fistfight for years.
I remember when I came on, people used to fight.
Now, everybody just grabs a gun.
— Go inside, girl!
— Apart from fighting the gun problem on the ground,
Cincinnati is also using a tool that’s less action and more CSI.
It’s called the National Integrated Ballistics Information Network, known as NIBIN…
— So once we hit the button,
it tells us all the suspects that were involved in
different crime scenes that the casing matches up to.
— …a database of bullet casings run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
— This is the firing pin impression...
— Every gun leaves unique identifying marks on a casing.
— It’s kind-of the fingerprint of the gun.
— That makes them key evidence,
because NIBIN can link multiple casings, found at different crimes, to one gun—
and sometimes one criminal.
— All I know is I heard a “pop, pop, pop.”
— Here’s how it works in Cincinnati:
— Came around the bend right here, coming towards me.
And he was loading the weapon back up.
— CPD’s gang enforcement unit is called to respond
to either a shooting or a “shots fired” scene.
— We’ve got a shell casing here.
— When they find a casing,
whether someone was hurt or not,
it’s treated like an important piece of evidence.
— Any time you have someone who rides through a residential community shooting a firearm,
the likelihood of them using that gun in some other capacity is extremely high,
so that makes collecting these shell casings very valuable.
— So what happens next?
It goes back and gets entered into NIBIN…?
— The officers are going to go ahead and tag the item.
We’re gonna go ahead and put it into our property room…
Yeah, actually I’m here to pick up a property.
…and then our NIBIN specialist retrieves it tomorrow.
— Everything is then brought to the NIBIN lab for processing.
— So this is the casing that you guys saw last night.
— There, casings are cleaned and entered into a system that creates 3D images.
— We’re gonna find the area that we want the algorithm to analyze.
— They’re sent to a “correlation center,”
where they’re compared to casings found at other crime scenes for matches.
— …we did get a NIBIN hit…
— That data is sent back to the cops,
and detectives will follow up on any potential “hits.”
— That one firearm was linked to…
one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight crimes.
— After years of trial and error,
Cincinnati’s NIBIN process is a model for others.
Police departments come to them for training.
— We had 426 people shot in Cincinnati last year.
We didn’t have 426 individuals who each pulled the trigger once—
we’ve got 40 to 50 that repeatedly pull the trigger,
they shoot two, three, four individuals before we can finally put a case on them.
— So how do you measure success with NIBIN?
— Well.
We know that NIBIN played a large role in our shooting reductions for last year.
We were one of the few large Midwest urban cities that
had a reduction in both homicides and total shootings.
— Cincinnati’s NIBIN process is a success—
but it’s been a challenge to implement there, and in police departments across the U.S.
There are less than 180 machines nationwide.
Machines cost as much as a quarter million dollars to buy.
And using them correctly requires a mindset shift from cops,
who tend to think of bullet casings as trash and the CSI stuff as boring.
— It takes someone describing it to you and then seeing it.
— Those are just some of the challenges ATF has faced as they try to widen the NIBIN network.
— Do you think that ATF maybe made a mistake in not getting out there
and telling police departments,
“You need to do this quickly, this is the right way to do it?”
— I think police departments, in general, are reactive.
I think there was a time when a stop sign shooting occurred, shots fired,
I don’t think the officers would have gotten out of their cars to pick up the cartridge cases to submit.
But now, I think officers are actually responding to the scene.
— But the federal government and ATF could do more to make this tool universal.
As Neudigate points out,
they’ve done it before with national fingerprint and DNA databases.
That’s lacking for NIBIN.
— There’s not a police department in the country
that’s gonna say, “We wouldn’t submit those fingerprints into AFIS.”
National practice.
We get DNA at a crime scene,
everybody’s going to submit that into CODIS.
But we are not submitting that ballistic trace evidence into NIBIN.
At some point, it’s got to be standardized practice.

Police Can Track Bullet Casings Like Fingerprints Now

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