April 19--Houston police investigators will get some help this spring tracking gun crimes.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives' Houston Field Division on Thursday plans to announce it will use a mobile ballistics tracing van here for at least 90 days.
The National Integrated Ballistic Information Network (NIBIN) van allows investigators to take high-resolution photographs of bullet casings found at crime scenes and upload them to the agency's national correlation center in Alabama, where technicians analyze them and match them to casings found at other crime scenes.
"The NIBIN van allows us to get leads back a little bit closer to real time," said Fred Milanowski, Special Agent in Charge of the ATF's Houston Field Division. "We can call down there and get emergency correlations back in as little as three hours."
The van is the latest push by the ATF to try to tackle gun crime in and around Houston. It comes as the agency has urged local law enforcement agencies to use the NIBIN database as an investigative tool by testing guns or casings found at crime scenes more quickly.
The ATF has pumped millions of dollars into the program in recent years, creating joint investigative task forces with police in cities most prone to gun violence.
Milanowski said that since the ATF and police revamped operations in Houston last year, investigators have arrested and charged 37 people based off NIBIN leads.
The ATF has deployed the van in Baltimore and Chicago, and it brought the van to Houston at the request of Chief Art Acevedo, he said.
The van will enhance the testing local technicians already perform at the Houston Forensic Science Center, and at Harris County and Fort Bend County crime labs, Milanowski said. Montgomery County -- which had previously sent evidence to Houston for testing -- also will be obtaining similar equipment in the coming months.
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