Ballistic Imaging (2008) / Chapter Skim
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5 Current Ballistic Image Databases: NIBIN and the State Reference Databases
5 Current Ballistic Image Databases: NIBIN and the State Reference Databases
Pages 133-161
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From page 133... ...
Well utilized, a ballistic image database maintained by an individual law enforcement agency could now surpass previous limitations of time and human recall. "Human memory or selected bullet or cartridge casing photographs [were]
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From page 134... ...
. The program grew to include other regional affiliations between ATF laboratories and major state and local law enforcement agencies: partnerships emerged between the ATF Atlanta laboratory and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, and between the ATF Walnut Creek, California, laboratory to the Oakland Police Department and Contra Costa County Sheriff's laboratories.
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From page 135... ...
How BOX 5-1 Criteria for Participation in the NIBIN Program To request participation in the NIBIN program, an executive of a state or local law enforcement agency had to submit a letter including the following information: • the population of the area to be served by automated ballistics technology, • the number of firearms-related violent crimes in the area serviced by the requesting agency, • statistics on firearms-related assaults and homicides for the previous year, • the number of firearms recovered by the requesting agency for the previous year, • the number of firearms traced by the requesting agency during the previous year, • whether the requesting agency had a firearms/toolmark examiner, • whether the requesting agency would dedicate staff to support the data entry of ballistics information into the IBIS equipment, • whether the requesting agency had a bullet and casing recovery system, • whether the requesting agency had sufficient space that was climate con trolled for placement of the equipment, • whether the agency would allow other agencies to use the IBIS equipment if the requesting agency received it, and • whether the agency would enter into a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the ATF regarding the administration of the program.
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From page 136... ...
Tulleners (2001: D‑1) surveyed ballistic image database usage by a number of California law enforcement agencies, including the DRUGFIRE data collected from agencies in southern California (including the Los Angeles Police Department)
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From page 137... ...
The partnership between the FBI and ATF in building NIBIN was further cemented by the structure of the NIBIN executive board (consisting of one senior ATF executive, one senior FBI executive, and an executive from a state or local law enforcement agency) and its technical working groups.
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From page 138... ...
. Part ner agencies must commit to entering as much crime gun evidence into the unit as possible, and to sharing intelligence information and evidence with other law enforcement agencies.
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From page 139... ...
Hence, an exhibit entered into NIBIN by the San Diego County Sheriff's Department is automatically correlated against exhibits from both San Diego-area NIBIN sites (after uploading to Walnut Creek)
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From page 140... ...
Louis Co PD Clayton Utah Plano PD St. Louis Metro PD 9 Northern Utah Lab Ogden SW Institute of Forensic Sci SE Missouri Cape Girardeau Arkansas Wyoming Texas DPS El Paso Arkansas State Crime Cheyenne State Lab Texas DPS Lubbock Mississippi Texas DPS Tyler Mississippi DPS Biloxi Tulsa PD Mississippi DPS Jacks Southern Jackson PD Austin PD North Louisiana Bexar Co Louisiana State Lab S Corpus Christi PD N Louisiana Lab Ale Texas DPS Austin*
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From page 141... ...
uri Cape Girardeau Arkansas Charleston Co SO GBI Decatur Arkansas State Crime Lab Charlotte PD GBI Savannah Mississippi Cumberland Co SO Valdosta PD Mississippi DPS Biloxi Greensboro PD Georgia Military Mississippi DPS Jackson Greenville PD U.S. Army Lab Atlanta Jackson PD Hickory PD North Florida North Louisiana New Hanover Co SO Florida DLE Jacksonville Louisiana State Lab Shreveport North Carolina SBI*
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From page 142... ...
. NIBIN sites are meant to provide regional access to ballistic imaging technology, and so individual law enforcement agencies within a region may partner with a NIBIN site to enter evidence as needed.
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From page 143... ...
First among these is the proviso that "no funds appropriated herein shall be available for salaries or administrative expenses in connection with consolidating or centralizing, within the Department of Justice, the records, or any portion thereof, of acquisition and disposition of firearms maintained by Federal firearms licensees." ATF has interpreted the acquisition of an image from a specimen fired from a gun for sale as such a "record," and hence excluded new guns from consideration in the database. 5–C NIBIN Usage 5–C.1 Deployment One metric by which utilization of NIBIN can be assessed is the number of participating agencies relative to the number of eligible law enforcement agencies. Each piece of evidence entered in NIBIN is associated with its source agency through specification of an Originating Agency Identifier (ORI)
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From page 144... ...
analyzed 888,447 records of firearms evidence entered into NIBIN by 196 partner agencies as of October 22, 2004; it concluded that the IBIS equipment had not been effectively deployed at many NIBIN sites. First, the level of entry appeared to be disproportionate: the 30 highest-entry partner agencies (15 percent)
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From page 145... ...
For example, at the time of the DOJ inquiry, the Prince George's County, Maryland, Police Department reported more than 1,000 recovered bullets and cartridge casings, and 269 test-fired bullets, cartridge casings, and guns were waiting to be entered into NIBIN. Third, some agencies did not regularly review "high confidence" candidate matches identified by IBIS to determine whether a true ballistics match existed.
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From page 146... ...
The NIBIN program compiles such programs in its "Hits of the Week" releases, which -- together with news accounts of individual cases -- are suggestive of some aspects of the program's utility and ability to draw investigative connections in real cases. The "Hits of the Week" releases from January 2002 through October 2006 contain 188 paragraph-length summaries of cases in which NIBIN played he T NIBIN "Hits of the Week" archive is located at http://www.nibin.gov/nb_success.htm [11/1/06]
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From page 147... ...
This is not to say that NIBIN hits are not cross-jurisdictional; indeed, the highlighted hits include numerous cases where separate police departments are able to generate links by submitting evidence to the same NIBIN site for acquisition and processing. For instance, the hit for March 18, 2003, indicates that multiple departments submit exhibits to the Essex County, New Jersey, Sheriff's Office for NIBIN entry, enabling links to be made between evi hough there are 190 paragraphs, they appear to cover only 188 distinct "cases." The T hit profiled for March 4, 2003, is an additional NIBIN-suggested link in a set of crimes first d escribed the week before on February 25.
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From page 148... ...
(When a gun was retrieved from suspects following a carjacking and police chase, test-fired evidence processed through NIBIN led to links between the gun and the five earlier incidents; the narrative is unclear whether NIBIN analysis suggested connections between the cases prior to recovery of the gun.) However, the most vivid of the NIBIN hit examples may be those that span months or years and resuscitate cold cases -- where the sheer passage of time reduces the probability that an investigative lead could be made by traditional firearms identification: • In Columbus, Ohio, a single shell casing was recovered from the scene of a murder where an elderly woman was slain during a purse snatch
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From page 149... ...
. • A drive-by shooting in Chicago that wounded two people yielded several cartridge casings and a bullet that were entered into NIBIN at the Illinois State Police Laboratory.
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From page 150... ...
entered this month; • total number of nonevidence bullets entered, lifetime; • hits arising from bullets this month; • total hits arising from bullets, lifetime; and • the same set of variables, repeated for cartridge casings rather than bullets. Consistent with the NIBIN program's definition of a hit (see Box 5-3)
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From page 151... ...
A basic summary of the operational data is given in Table 5-1. Cartridge casings make up about 71 percent of the database entries; in turn, about 72 percent of those casings are "nonevidence" test fires (as opposed to "evidence" casings directly recovered at the crime scene)
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From page 152... ...
5/03 2,682 7,410 441,636 166 6,331 546 2,765 195,382 3 293 6/03 3,206 6,471 451,006 160 6,514 637 2,387 198,355 6 299 7/03 3,435 7,423 461,669 190 6,828 727 2,506 201,525 1 300 8/03 2,757 7,169 471,009 160 7,026 554 2,209 204,172 2 302 9/03 3,030 7,672 481,465 250 7,372 607 2,095 206,842 1 298 10/03 2,998 7,069 491,182 204 7,592 506 2,188 209,415 2 300 11/03 2,747 6,990 500,786 156 7,776 543 2,275 212,169 0 300 12/03 2,544 7,206 510,383 201 7,977 507 2,221 214,869 2 302 1/04 2,544 7,129 520,447 207 8,184 680 2,156 217,627 7 305 2/04 3,167 7,549 530,978 147 8,332 543 2,579 220,676 1 306 3/04 3,465 9,662 520,257 249 8,570 625 2,880 223,930 14 316 4/04 3,062 8,606 554,578 228 8,910 510 2,694 226,830 72 388 NOTES: As of April 2004, 397,349 of the 554,578 total cartridge casings in the NIBIN database were from test fires, and 183,756 of the 226,830 bullets in the database were test fires. The apparent reason for the decline in the total number of casings in the NIBIN database between February and March 2004 is transcription error in the raw spreadsheets for several police departments in Michigan, particularly the Detroit Police Department (for which the reported total number of casings in February, March, and April 2004, are 19,342, 3,956, and 19,927, respectively)
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From page 153... ...
The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) has compiled a "crosswalk" dataset, linking UCR ORI codes with BJS' Directory of Law Enforcement Agencies and data from the Census Bureau's Governments Integrated Directory (Lindgren
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From page 154... ...
Due to these difficulties, we have treated our own attempts to link the NIBIN operational data with UCR figures as merely suggestive and in no way definitive; yet we judged it important to try to get some sense of whether high-crime areas are likely to benefit from hits achieved by ballistic image comparisons. We erred on the side of simplicity by using crime data from the NIBIN site's home city as a proxy for the number of crimes committed in the site's service area, combining NIBIN entry counts in some cases where multiple installations are located in the same city. We also filtered cases to look only at NIBIN host cities with populations above 10,000.
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From page 155... ...
Taking into account the contributions of the other predictors in the model, we found that the probability of a hit on cartridge casings increased as a function of the number of violent crimes in the NIBIN site locality during 2003 as well as on the number of evidence casings entered in the system. Likewise, the probability of a hit decreased with increased murder and non-negligent manslaughters in the locality and with the total number of bullets entered into the NIBIN system.
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From page 156... ...
This finding suggests that agencies might be better served by prioritizing entries so that evidence samples are entered into NIBIN most promptly. 5–E State Reference Ballistic Imaging Databases The existing state reference ballistic image databases in New York and Maryland operate using the same IBIS computer and microscope image; their networks and correlation servers are entirely distinct, however, thus complying with the current prohibition on noncrime-gun evidence in the NIBIN database.
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From page 157... ...
The 2004 report, which included initial capital to purchase the IBIS equipment, placed the cumulative cost of the database over 4 years at $2.6 million. Based on handgun sales data prior to the enabling law's passage, it was projected that cartridge casings for approximately 30,000 handguns would be entered into the system annually; actual entry had only been about one-third that amount, with 43,729 handguns in the database through 2004 (Maryland State Police Forensic Sciences Division, 2004:2)
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From page 158... ...
Two later hits also were found to two pistols (different manufacturers) that had been stolen from a common dealership; investigative leads were generated in a robbery and "a major burglary and assault case" (Maryland State Police Forensic Sciences Division, 2003:7)
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From page 159... ...
5–E.2 New York: CoBIS The Combined Ballistic Identification System (CoBIS) is the state of New York's reference ballistic image database and is maintained by the New York State Police (NYSP)
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From page 160... ...
Specifically, ATF has provided the NYSP with NIBIN exhibits for other New York state law enforcement agencies, in the form of data tapes. With FTI assistance, these tapes have been used to run batches of requests on exhibits dating back to CoBIS' inception in March 2001.
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From page 161... ...
to multiple-phase expansions in scope to include additional classes of firearms and ballistic images of bullets for those weapons that do not eject shell casings (A00968, A06462)
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