Technology has affected nearly every facet of our lives. Think about it. When is the last time you memorized someone’s phone number or looked at a map for directions? I bet most of us can’t recall the directions to our local barbershop without relying on technology. With technology advancements so ubiquitous throughout modern culture, why is it that many industries struggle to adopt these advancements even if it would result in a net-benefit to society? Today, I want to talk about technology modernization within the law enforcement industry. Not from a general perspective but more so from the lens of crime gun analysis.
The National Integrated Ballistic Information Network (NIBIN) is the cornerstone for aiding in the investigations of crimes involving firearms in the United States. NIBIN provides police investigators with ballistic leads and evidence that are then used to further investigate crimes that potentially involve the same firearm. After a casing recovered at a scene is submitted for analysis to a crime lab, the evidence is then put through a process called acquisitioning where microscopic images are taken of the casing and then scanned for possible matches to other casings that are already stored in NIBIN. If there is a likely match, a NIBIN lead is generated, and the details of the casing and possible matching casing(s) are sent back to the originating organization for further investigation and follow up. However, NIBIN casing matches are only possible matches and not an absolute determination of matches. The confirmation process includes multiple layers of peer review to include Firearms Examiners confirming if there is a match on one or more casing(s) fired from the same weapon; and, often Firearms Examiner expert opinions are given as court testimony during trials.
According to data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), NIBIN stored 4.2 million pieces of ballistic evidence and generated 223,000 NIBIN leads in 2020. NIBIN provides tremendous value to not only the law enforcement communities that are using the data to drive investigations and prosecute suspects but also to the communities that are plagued by gun violence. Unfortunately, not all law enforcement organizations use NIBIN or have a crime gun specific strategy and process. ATF does support 25 Crime Gun Intelligence Centers (CGICS) that are strategically placed across the country and partner with many law enforcement organizations to bolster crime gun investigations. However, there is still a considerable gap in the use of NIBIN data especially amongst smaller organizations with limited staffing and resources.
Further, for the law enforcement organizations that are using NIBIN, many have adopted a mostly manual process where data is acquired and integrated through specialized experience and skills and from various data dumps and screen scrapes. This is not due to the lack of skills but rather a lack of using modern technology and analytical techniques. Law enforcement organizations can turn the corner and begin using NIBIN data with the help of modern technology through industry partnerships that will better equip staff with the necessary means and tools to identify and draw associations and patterns with their organization’s data. Leveraging technology to surface entity relationships (people-places-vehicles) with NIBIN data can help law enforcement organizations drive investigations by uncovering more leads that are otherwise elusive when using manual investigative management techniques. There is incredible upside when equipping your organization with modern technology – it truly is a force multiplier where the organization can be more productive and focus on the tasks that matter most to the mission of the organization.
To that end, workflow automation is a key aspect to consider. If your organization is currently leveraging NIBIN data, chances are your staff is struggling to collect the data from various systems and sources, integrate the data on spreadsheets, maintain those spreadsheets in a safe and secure area where it cannot be accidentally modified or deleted, and draw associations and conclusions from the data. These steps are manually intensive and often take staff hours, days, and weeks to manage. This is where modern technology can help automate the collection, standardization, and integration of the data. The same steps your staff perform can be written into systematic logic that can execute the same functions in a fraction of the time without all the manual effort. Just to be clear, automation does not mean your staff no longer have a job. Actually the opposite is true, your staff can now focus on high-value tasks that directly contribute to investigations and analysis. In the manual process world, your organization’s processes are tightly coupled to the people and not the organization. Automation will help couple these processes to the organization and not directly to the people. This is beneficial for several reasons, and it will ensure the organization can continue to function in the absence of key staff members who have the specialized knowledge of NIBIN data.
The benefit of visualizing entity data[1] on a spatial and interactive display cannot be understated. Inferring associations, patterns, and conclusions from two-dimensional data is problematic. Scanning multiple spreadsheets for matches across thousands or millions of rows of data can result in missed investigative leads, missed associations, and missed opportunities and lead to community distrust. A modern analytical platform will take the data from those spreadsheets, if the data are not available systematically, find the patterns, matches and associations and show those relationships through an intuitive and interactive display.
For example, a law enforcement organization receives a NIBIN lead based on casings found at a crime scene and there is a possible match to other casings recovered at prior events. A spatial display of the data will show these entities and their relationships on a network diagram and/or a map based visual. The analyst can quickly see this and not have to find these relationships in the data – the technology does it for you based on the matching criteria and logic the analyst would typically perform manually. Months later, a casing from a test fired weapon is recovered from a traffic stop is also a likely match and has a confirmed hit[2] to the casings recovered at the initial crime scene. The technology will now show the NIBIN leads, weapon data, the traffic stop event, the suspect, the addresses and locations of those events and people, and the vehicle information data spatially and interactively. Analysts will typically have to extract these data points and assemble a link chart. With a little automation and business rules for entity resolution and matching, this can be done both automatically and reliably.
None of this is possible without quality data going into the system, and NIBIN data is no exception. Standardizing on commonly used data fields, values, and naming conventions will greatly increase law enforcements’ ability to resolve NIBIN and weapons data either locally, regionally, and/or nationally. For example, there are numerous terms used to identify a weapon that was not legally manufactured by a weapons manufacturer and assigned a serial number. Such terms include ghost guns, homemade firearms, and privately made firearms (PMF). These terms are synonymous but lack broad standardization of use. This is key when trying to resolve an instance of a weapon across various data sources such as your records management system (RMS) and NIBIN. If the make is used in the matching criteria for a PMF, the same weapon that was used in multiple crimes would not resolve if each department does not use a common term, such as PMF, but uses homemade firearm instead. In the absence of a serial number, it is critical to use common terms and attributes for the matching criteria, such as casing caliber, make, model, NIBIN lead number, IBIS number, and the agency case number, for example.
If your organization is not currently using NIBIN data, or you are leveraging NIBIN data but mired by manual workflow and data processing, I implore you to begin thinking about how the use of NIBIN data can help your crime gun unit, your organization, and your community. The use of modern technology and analytical techniques is not just a function of larger organizations, these capabilities are within reach of mid to smaller organizations with the help of federal and industry partners.
- This can be data from your organization’s Records Management System (RMS), Computer-Aided Dispatch (CAD), etc… and takes the form of people, places, and things.
- The term hit is used after a firearm examiner provides expert opinion that one or more casings were fired from the same weapon.
Comments