In a recent investigation at a northwest Georgia high school campus, officers confiscated an illegally possessed gun from a suspect. The officers submitted the gun for ballistic testing through a forensic process known as NIBIN, the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network. True to form, NIBIN traced a casing from a bullet shot from the gun and found it matched casings police recovered from the scene of a shooting weeks earlier and miles away from the school campus.
In another recent northwest Georgia case, officers confiscated a gun from a driver they arrested for drug possession and NIBIN traced that gun to the scene of a shooting that occurred in Chattanooga, where it also turned out the arrested driver lived.
In both cases, the NIBIN process scientifically linked guns and the suspects who possessed them to additional unsolved crime scenes at locations other than where they were arrested.
A closer look at NIBIN reveals it is an advanced ballistic testing system, guided by the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), and it is now available to law enforcement at 13 locations in Georgia. State and local law enforcement agencies are increasingly using NIBIN to trace guns and gun casings they confiscate from crime scenes. And the results are encouraging. NIBIN is helping them solve numerous shooting and homicide cases, all with the ultimate objective of combatting rising gun violence statewide.
Before NIBIN, the main method of tracing guns used in crimes was to compare unique markings on bullet projectiles to link them back to the guns from which they were fired. Although that system is still in use, it has a limited success rate. When projectiles strike hard surfaces, as they frequently do, they become distorted or fragmented, thus destroying the unique marks that link them to the gun from which they were fired.
The advantage of the NIBIN system is that it compares bullet casings, which are far less likely to be damaged on impact because they are mechanically ejected from the side of a gun. They merely fall to the ground instead of being shot from the muzzle at high velocity. Therefore, casings rarely become damaged, and they are easily collected by hand or with a magnet. The odds of successfully linking casings to a gun, or casings ejected from the same gun at different crime scenes are much higher than for projectiles or bullet fragments.
Once NIBIN examiners process casings, they compare them to a national database of casings from guns used in crimes, everywhere the police submit casings. NIBIN not only crossmatches bullet casings to specific guns, but also to casings collected by police from other crime scenes, in the same or different jurisdictions. Some of the matches connect guns and suspects to multiple shooting and homicide scenes, providing invaluable investigative leads.
Crime scenes found to be connected by matching gun casings enable detectives to study leads from each of the scenes, some of which may also have also produced DNA, video, fingerprint, ballistic or other hard evidence. The hard evidence is then evaluated to see if it corelates with witness or victim statements from any of the crime scenes. Meanwhile, police crime analysts from each of the involved law enforcement agencies collaborate to compare evidence from multiple crime scenes within a wide radius of the original shooting.
Roughly 85 percent of all gun violence is committed by gang members and drug traffickers shooting each other. They tend to use semi-automatic handguns, rapidly firing multiple rounds, thus ejecting multiple casings in each shooting event. Since most criminals are untrained shooters, they normally do not count the rounds they fire or hang around to pick up their hot spent casings before fleeing the scene. Thus, they leave behind a trail of casings the police can use to reconstruct the original crime scene and link it to others. In some cases, multiple shooters shoot at each other, and casings at the scene may produce two or more sets of leads.
Sets of NIBIN hardware, software and trained inspectors in Georgia are at ATF headquarters, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) and at the larger city and county police departments. The agencies work cooperatively, but the number of shooting cases and the time needed to process each set of casings while maintaining an appropriate chain of custody suitable for eventual court presentation, makes the NIBIN process slower than it could be in Georgia.
Without a doubt, Georgia needs more sets of NIBIN equipment and inspectors dispersed regionally to make a greater statewide impact on overall gun violence.
Dan Flynn is the former police chief of Savannah and Marietta.
