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Leveraging NIBIN Leads: 4 Technologies That Can Assist

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There has been a stark increase in gun violence over the last few years, and law enforcement agencies, facing budget cuts and fewer resources, are feeling underequipped and overburdened.

In major cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, agencies are sometimes receiving as many as 1500 NIBIN leads per month, leaving a major chasm between the level of gun crime and the number of officers available to follow up and manage cases.

Given the realities of today’s climate, speed and efficiency are more critical than ever when solving violent gun crimes. This heightened focus on efficiency has also brought a heightened focus on case organization and management, but case management has its own complexities as well.

Solving Gun Crimes: The Current State of Case Management

The reality is that case management is currently not standardized. More often than not, it’s disjointed, with different state and federal agencies solving gun crime tracking information in different ways—and often with spreadsheets. This presents a variety of logistical challenges and inefficiencies. For example, there are often huge redundancies in the input of manual entry, with investigators and analysts sometimes inputting the same case information for a single gun crime case into five different systems.

The NIBIN Enforcement Support System (NESS), maintained by the ATF, serves as the national repository for NIBIN information pertaining to firearms and other ballistic evidence used in the commission of a crime. But without a comprehensive case management solution and strategy, leveraging NESS alone won’t be enough to ensure that potential leads don’t slip through the cracks.

There are four valuable technologies that, when used in tandem with NESS, can help agencies effectively combat gun crime: ShotSpotter®, NIBIN, CrimeTracer™, and CaseBuilder™. In the next section, we’ll discuss each in more detail and the valuable role they play in this process.

ShotSpotter

More than 80 percent of gunfire incidents nationwide are not reported to the police, a staggering statistic. ShotSpotter fills this troublesome gap with networks of acoustic sensors that can detect, locate and alert police of gunfire—often in under 60 seconds. Leveraging ShotSpotter enables a far greater level of shell casing recovery compared to a scene where, either no one called 9-1-1, or the actual location of the gunfire cannot be determined. With ShotSpotter, more shell casings can then ultimately be fed to NIBIN.

NIBIN

The National Integrated Ballistic Information Network is a program overseen by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) that automates ballistics evaluations and provides investigative leads to law enforcement agencies. This tool allows investigators to share information with each other, improving their overall effectiveness in closing cases.

According to the ATF Report Crime Gun Intelligence: An Evidence-Based Approach to Solving Violent Crime there are four best practices for NIBIN sites. They are:

  1. Comprehensive Collection: This is the foundation of NIBIN. ShotSpotter is a critical technology to help with this—after all, investigators will be able to collect more evidence if they are alerted to gun crimes that would have otherwise gone unreported, and can actually find the shell casings once they arrive.
  2. Timeliness: Violent crime investigations can go cold quickly. ShotSpotter is also pivotal for this, as it alerts officers to arrive at scenes quickly.
  3. Investigative Follow-Up: NIBIN provides valuable links between investigations, and aids in the prosecution of associated violent crime and shooters. CrimeTracer and ShotSpotter, with their advanced analytic capabilities which we will detail in the next section, can also be extremely helpful with this step as well.
  4. Feedback: Feedback for all parties involved in the NIBIN process is vital to sustaining a successful NIBIN program. We will discuss how CaseBuilder can help with this.

CrimeTracer

CrimeTracer deploys the most comprehensive set of law enforcement data in the industry, allowing agencies to access critical and relevant information from not only their agency’s systems, but across their city, county, state, and country. It is an essential tool for linking all of the associated leads based on the cases associated with the NIBIN hit report. With CrimeTracer, investigators can reduce manual input of information from up to five different sources to just two (RMS->NIBIN data entry). Correlation can then be achieved in CrimeTracer via an existing spreadsheet or a simple lookup tool.

Furthermore, CrimeTracer is a powerful tool for investigative follow-up because it provides actionable insights beyond all of the initially linked cases through powerful analytics and visualization. This includes enabling law enforcement to search data from agencies across the country using natural language speech terms and concepts. CrimeTracer also provides real-time visualizations that help identify crime trends and persons/vehicles/locations, etc. of interest to solve and ultimately prevent further criminal activity.

crimetracer-search-results

CaseBuilder

CaseBuilder automates the process of importing NIBIN leads and captures information about investigations connected by the same firearms via ballistics evidence matching. This streamlines the ability for investigators to manage gun cases, clear cases effectively, and identify the most violent repeat offenders for prosecution. Additionally, CaseBuilder fosters seamless collaboration with a variety of non-law-enforcement stakeholders, such as 9-1-1 dispatchers, medical technicians, and victim advocates, and provides the ability to disseminate case information to the applicable stakeholders.

With regards to feedback, CaseBuilder’s case disposition and dissemination are secured means of communicating outcomes to the ATF. Additionally, CaseBuilder supports a supplemental conferral, which is useful for documentation and communicating directly with the ATF on a CGIC case associated with a NIBIN Lead.

Conclusion

While reducing gun crime is a daunting task, it is also attainable with the right tools, technologies, and strategies. By leveraging ShotSpotter, NIBIN, CrimeTracer, and CaseBuilder, law enforcement agencies will be sure to make progress toward this monumentally important and increasingly urgent goal.

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Author Profile
Joel Ste. Marie
Joel Ste. Marie is the Vice President of Solutions Consulting and Customer Success, CrimeTracer division...Show More
Joel Ste. Marie is the Vice President of Solutions Consulting and Customer Success, CrimeTracer division at SoundThinking. As a career law enforcement technologist, strategist, and evangelist, he has spent the last quarter-century advocating for law enforcement effectiveness and officer safety through the use of advanced technologies. Show Less
a man with a beard and a blue shirt
Author Profile
Jamie Algatt
Jamie has worked in public safety for over 20 years as a first responder and partner. His expertise is...Show More
Jamie has worked in public safety for over 20 years as a first responder and partner. His expertise is web-based, cloud-native solutions for public safety utilizing Windows and mobile platforms for delivery. Jamie has helped implement enterprise solutions with some of the largest law agencies in North America and internationally. At SoundThinking, Jamie helps agencies achieve higher case closure rates by successfully implementing CaseBuilder. Show Less

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