Its an investigative tool that can link firearms which have been used in multiple crimes from ballistic evidence recovered at the scenes. Not a panacea for "gun crime" and not a threat to those exercising their rights as addressed in the 2nd Amendment.

Point of order- NIBIN has nothing to do with bullets.

Will Davenport police begin collecting brass at ranges in an effort to identify/"match up" shell casings found at crime scenes? Will criminals start doing similar so as to have something with which to salt these scenes? Will policing your own brass be discouraged/suspected? I think it could well be an inconvenience if not responsibly managed with respect to lawful shooters.

And off we go!

I’m buying stock in Reynolds.

quote:

Originally posted by jljones:
And off we go!

I’m buying stock in Reynolds.

It's already up .5 a point.

sorry , I thought bullets were a portion of ballistics
so do they have to send recovered bullets out to Des Moines ?
to have analyzed ?

This is what I understand about NIBIN :
"NIBIN is a national database of digital images of spent bullets and cartridge cases that were found at crime scenes or test-fired from confiscated weapons. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) manages the system and provides the equipment to crime labs around the country."

When some thug shoot up a house, the spent brass and bullets dug out of the house can be compared to some known thug's pistole. Having the equipment at the local crime lab helps with the turnaround time.

I scoffed about NIBIN when it first came here.

It's been an AWESOME tool for us in regards to connecting events and developing new investigative leads. I fully admit I was wrong about it.

quote:

Originally posted by cne32507:
This is what I understand about NIBIN :
"NIBIN is a national database of digital images of spent bullets and cartridge cases that were found at crime scenes or test-fired from confiscated weapons. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) manages the system and provides the equipment to crime labs around the country."

When some thug shoot up a house, the spent brass and bullets dug out of the house can be compared to some known thug's pistole. Having the equipment at the local crime lab helps with the turnaround time.

That may be what it says, but currently no bullets are being entered into NIBIN in my region. I haven't heard of it being done in other regions. It is all about casings.

The black helicopter ignorance about "salting" and going to a range and picking up casing to run against the system is just that intertwined with a lot of paranoia.

Right now, there are very few NIBIN machines in the nation. It takes between 21 and 24 minutes to enter a single case. So you do the math and figure how few cases can be done in a single day. Each case has to come from- A crime scene, or a recovered firearm. There are only certain firearms that can be test fired and entered.

To give you a scope of reference, there are presently two NIBIN machines in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. There are 800 state and local agencies in Kentucky. Plus the federal agencies. You do the math.

Most of the information about NIBIN is considered LE sensitive information as not to compromise the integrity. It's all stuff you can find out on the internet if you look hard enough, but they frown on us being much more specific than that.

This "salting" thing is pretty dumb. Ray Ray and de'Quan are going to take the time to pick up spent casings on a range (and fight off the 70 year old guys picking up brass) to pick up brass to have another person in the car throw out the brass to confuse the cops when they are doing a drive by? DrEvil/Riiiiiigggggghhhhhtttt/DrEviloff

Most that are worried about it are just using revolvers.

Cops picking brass up off of the range to run it? Seriously? What the flying monkey turds would that actually show? Someone, at some time or another, shot a crime gun at that range? It produces zero actual usable information. None.

But, you can't dilute perfectly good paranoia with logic.

NIBIN is an awesome tool.

More details. The link has three photos.

https://qconline.com/news/loca...urce=home-the-latest

It just creates this spider's web of information': Davenport police rolls out new technology to fight gun crimes

Tara Becker-Gray
tbecker@qctimes.com
Sep 5, 2019 Updated 19 min ago

Tucked away in a small room in the Davenport Police Department is one of the agency’s most valuable tools for solving shootings in the city and the Quad-Cities.

The Integrated Ballistic Identification System, installed in late June, allows trained crime scene technicians to take cartridge cases and cartridges test fired from seized guns and try to connect them to other crime scenes locally, regionally or nationally.

The database, the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, or NIBIN, is a forensic ballistics evidence tracker managed by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Davenport has on average 160 to 180 shooting incidents each year. On average, they seize about 280 firearms.

Davenport Police Maj. Jeff Bladel said the system is a long time coming.

“This technology not only connects us here, it strengthens those partnerships that we have as far as in information intelligence and then working with the prosecutors for prosecution,” he said. "Every effort we're putting forward is to curb gun violence and make our community safe, and NIBIN is huge."

Late last year, city officials set aside $400,000 to invest in the technology, a decision that received unanimous approval in City Hall.

Davenport and Des Moines are the only police departments in Iowa to have it.

What is it?

NIBIN, operating since the 1990s, provides ballistics image correlation relation services to more than 45 sites nationwide, according to the ATF’s website.

By connecting to the center, officers and technicians can spend time on other aspects of the investigation, which, ATF says, improves the leads investigators get when working on violent gun crime.

In the past, Davenport sent cartridge cases to the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation Criminalistic Laboratory. The lab analyzed the evidence and entered it into NIBIN to see if it generated any investigative leads. But as the only lab in the state, the turnaround time for non-homicide cases was six to eight months.

“Our shots-fired calls kept getting pushed back and pushed back,” Jessica Heising, Davenport’s identification bureau manager, said. “Then all of a sudden, nine months later, we get the information. I mean, it’s cool to know, but it’s not exactly useful nine months later.”

With its own technology, Davenport technicians can get information into the network much quicker, she said.

“We're able to have a really impressive turnaround time and get that valuable information into the hands of investigators sooner,” she said.

Two civilian crime scene unit technicians were trained at the National Correlation and Training Center in Huntsville, Alabama in June. Two more trained in August.

They started entering evidence into the system in June, and the department was connected to the correlation center in August.

Two of the four technicians are also trained to run the analysis that the correlation center does, Heising said.

How does it work?

The first step is the “acquisition process,” when a technician examines a cartridge case under a microscope. They look at the head stamp of the casing and specific identifying features, such as firing pin impression.

The case is place in the IBIS machine, which takes a series of photographs and creates a digital 3D image.

“They’re able to actually turn it, rotate it and move it around and pick what kind of lighting they want to view it with,” Heising said. “There’s all different kinds of ways to view it so that they can make certain features pop out more or whatever's more agreeable to their own eye. Every individual is different.”

The technician will mark identifying features before sending it to the correlation center for comparison.

The whole process takes 20 to 30 minutes, which frees up the technicians to get back on the street or in the lab processing evidence.

“It's really very time effective for us where we can really use our resources and maximize them,” Heising said.

Some weapons are test fired by the department’s gun unit before a technician enters it into NIBIN.

“We’re linking shots fired incidents with shots fired incidents,” Bladel said. “We’re also linking shots fired incidents with guns. And, if we have the opportunity to apprehend someone with a firearm on them, we will have the ability to kind of track that firearm.”

The National Correlation and Training Center is usually able to complete a review within 48 hours.

Bladel said results have been returned in as little as one hour.

Heising estimated that technicians so far have submitted about 50 cases so far.

The department plans to work through the back log of cases returned from the state crime lab, Heising said, but the priority is recent cases.

Bladel said the department is already seeing results. In one instance, one cartridge was tied to four of five different shots fired incidents.

“In some of the shootings and in shots fired cases, it’s very retaliatory and it’s back and forth and back and forth, and the sooner we can catch those patterns, the sooner we can potentially identify the groups that are in the feud and then jump on that a lot quicker,” he said.

“It just creates this spider's web of information,” Heising said. “Guns are transient things. It’ll travel in the same group of people, so you’re able to link these scenes, and doing that in real time is much more beneficial doing that in backlog time."

She hopes the shorter turnaround time will, in the long run, curb the number of cases the department handles.

Later this month, Rock Island police will send two people to the Alabama training center. Once back, they'll have an in-house training with Davenport Police, Bladel said.

The goal will then be to “trickle” in the other police agencies in Scott and Rock Island counties, he said.

"We very much want this to be a collaborative effort because that's the only way we're ever really going to get anything accomplished with so much traffic that goes back and forth across the river,” Heising said. “Hitting this as a team and being on a unified front is the best way to get a handle on it.”

ATF page on NIBIN:

https://www.atf.gov/firearms/n...mation-network-nibin

Local media report on the center in Huntsville,
but not on Redstone Arsenal:

https://www.waff.com/2019/04/1...sville-combat-crime/

Dangit, now every time I go to withdraw money at the local Dollar General I gotta have this??

quote:

Originally posted by slabsides45:
Dangit, now every time I go to withdraw money at the local Dollar General I gotta have this?

. Love it! Does that thing work at all?

Another report on the Davenport (IA) system, video is on the link.

https://www.kwqc.com/content/n...NIBIN-562682251.html

Davenport police can solve cases quicker because of forensic system for ballistics

By Montse Ricossa | Posted: Wed 10:09 PM, Oct 09, 2019

DAVENPORT, Iowa. (KWQC) - Davenport police are now able to solve cases more quickly by using a nationwide program that tracks shell casings. The police department is most excited about the turnaround time for getting ballistic results: before, they would send shell casings to an area near Des Moines and have to wait 4 to 8 months to get results back. Now, they can get results in days or even hours thanks to NIBIN, the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network.

Davenport Police Department recently purchased NIBIN, a system that helps match gunshell cases to others across the United States. They say this will help them solve cases quicker; instead of waiting 4-8 months for results, they only wait a few hours.
Each bullet casing has a unique "fingerprint" which can be traced back to its original firearm in the system, solving cases while they're still active. They see most people who commit gun violence crossing cities, so by having this system they hope they can prevent future shots fired.

Davenport has seen violent crime go down 20% in the last two years, 8.6% in 2018 and 12% in 2017. However, violent gun crime has remained the same. So far this year, Davenport has seen 143 shots fired incidents which is similar to last year's rate. This year, they've confiscated 258 firearms, most of which they believe are stolen.

"Gun events are becoming more frequent with our officers and that's why it's important to have the technology in house. We can jump on our investigative leads a lot quicker and we can hopeully ensure the safety of our officers as well as the safety of our community," said Davenport Major Jeff Bladel.

Police say they treat every gun related incident as a potential homicide, while sometimes it may be that people are target practicing or guns accidentally go off. Their overall goal however is to address and reduce violent crime in the community.

Bladel continued, "when we're talking about violent crime, it truly is a community effort to address violent crime. Every resource we can do, every community engagement, involvement, participation that we can do, we are all in and violent crime is definitely our priority."

Davenport P.D. is working on getting other area cities trained to use the system. That way, even more cases in the Quad Cities can be solved at a faster rate. There are about 150 NIBIN systems throughout the United States, which Davenport can use to trace against.

How wonderful they have the time and energy to test bullets and cases but no time to test rape kits of women.

quote:

Originally posted by smschulz:
How wonderful they have the time and energy to test bullets and cases but no time to test rape kits of women.

This is essentially fake news.

There was a huge expose on all of this in the last year or two and like most things, the "whole story" gets glossed over in the interest of sensationalism.

First of all, sexual assault kits in Iowa or ALL tested by the state crime lab. I am aware of no agency that has the resources, facilities, or personnel to do this on their own, so they all go to one place whether you are arrested in Davenport or Des Moines or Mount Ayr. The state crime lab is a very good facility and fairly well funded, but there is always going to be more work than there are people. There are also problems with retaining staff - this is true of most government run labs - it's hard to compete with the private sector. A lot of the tenured criminalists working in government labs are playing for the love of the game...they believe in the mission. You cannot overstate how important that is.

Second, when testing sexual assault kits, victims' wishes are important. A lot of victims have kits done because they are concerned about injury, infection, pregnancy, etc. Many do not want to have somebody prosecuted. Many do not know if they want somebody prosecuted. The kits are still completed and stored, but many are not tested because the victim does not want them tested. There is a major ethical dilemma if you test every kit and then potentially identify a suspect with multiple victims where maybe your strongest case is a victim that does not want prosecution. Victims decide how to proceed on these cases, and they should. So a lot of kits sit for that reason.

And then there's the question of what you're actually going to "get" out of a kit. In a large number of cases (the majority), the suspect is known to the victim. Sending the kit in to have it processed serves no real purpose in identifying the suspect, at least not inasmuch as their identity is unknown at the time of the exam. If a case is heading to prosecution, of course DNA confirmation would be important, but that DNA confirmation is not absolutely vital in cases where the parties are known to each other.

I also hate to open this can of worms, but I think there is a disconnect between terms like "rape" and "sexual assault" in peoples' minds and what these cases actually are, by and large. I am NOT saying that any of them are less significant, at all, and I cannot overstate that, but I think the public hears those terms and pictures a stranger in dark clothing pulling a woman into an alley and disappearing into the night. Cases like that make up such a small percentage of cases that you pretty much hear about every one.

Part of the response to the news stories that kicked all of this off was the development of a form, used statewide, where the victim states their wishes in writing when the kit is taken. There are options to have the kit processed and to state that they are seeking an investigation by LE and prosecution, an option stating that they want to the kit processed but are not requesting prosecution right now, and an option to basically store it and request no investigation. I can only speak for my agency and those around me when I say that these are filled out on every single kit, period. We have a good sexual assault response team that includes nurse examiners, advocates, other social organizations, and law enforcement. I virtually guarantee you something similar is in place in Davenport.

And finally, let's not pretend that gun crime including shootings, robberies, and murders is somehow expected to take a backseat. It's not like it's not serious...

So please, consider the facts and not just the news.

Didn't stay at holiday inn.

Seems to me that in today's world of high tech manufacturing, a lot of the same make and model glocks (pick your brand I suppose) would all have VERY similar markings when new. Seems like something would have to happen to the chamber during a cleaning or other "incident" to make that chamber much different from the other 15,000 (or million) chambers from the same model of gun.

I can't see it as being as different as fingerprints.

Also,

Would it be as simple as taking a piece of steel and scratching the chamber/bore a little when you got home from your driveby ? So the test brass from that gun looks different than it did before the scratching ?

Isn't this the same type of thing that Maryland(?) and New York wasted many millions of dollars on with near zero return? Even THEY were smart enough to finally give it up.