ATF honors Allegheny County’s crime lab

The ATF hon­ors a lab­o­ra­tory for obtain­ing it’s 1,500^th NIBIN hit. This is no small feat, and shows the ded­i­ca­tion and hard work put in by all peo­ple at the crime lab. What the ATF never seems to men­tion in these types of sto­ries is how many con­vic­tions were made as a result of those hits.

It’s an inter­est­ing exer­cise (NIBIN data­base sys­tems), but who really cares how many hits are obtained, it’s the num­ber of crim­i­nals that are taken off the street. From my own per­sonal expe­ri­ences with the sys­tem, I would doubt it if more than 10 con­vic­tions were made as a result of the 1,500 NIBIN hits. Quite pos­si­bly under 5.

The prob­lem is unlike AFIS (fin­ger­print data­base) and CoDIS (DNA data­base), the NIBIN data­base matches up to a tool used in the shoot­ing inci­dent (cas­ings, bul­lets to firearms), and not to an actual per­son. Even after a hit is made is NIBIN, it’s rather dif­fi­cult to prove who the shooter was at the time of the crime.

Original post located here:

Wednesday, December 17, 2008
By Daniel Malloy, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

For the past decade, Allegheny County crime lab tech­ni­cians have matched evi­dence in gun cases at a rate that is among the most pro­lific in the country.

The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives hon­ored the lab yes­ter­day for its 1,500^th pos­i­tive iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of a firearm using the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, a nation­wide com­puter catalogue.

The lab ranks 12^th in the coun­try in the amount of gun evi­dence entered into the sys­tem and fifth in num­ber of matches — a sign that it is one of the most effec­tive labs in the coun­try, said Corey G. Hill, east­ern regional coör­di­na­tor for the bureau. The four labs that have made more gun matches are from much larger met­ro­pol­i­tan areas.

Announced at a news con­fer­ence headed by County Executive Dan Onorato, the honor was a bit of pos­i­tive news for a lab that has been crit­i­cized heav­ily in the past few years for its back­log of cases that has led to delays in the court system.

District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala Jr. pro­vided fund­ing for smaller fin­ger­print labs run by munic­i­pal police depart­ments, which have faced long waits in get­ting results back from the county lab.

“There’s been crit­i­cism of the crime lab, but this proves how far we’ve come,” said county police Superintendent Charles Moffatt. Without the lab’s strong bal­lis­tics work, “we could not solve some of the cases we con­tinue to solve,” he said.

The seven staff mem­bers in the bal­lis­tics sec­tion enter bul­lets, frag­ments and shell cas­ings into the national com­puter data­base, which can match them up with firearms evi­dence from other cases. This is pos­si­ble because each gun leaves a unique sig­na­ture on a bullet.

Sometimes dis­cov­er­ing a link between two gun crimes can be the dif­fer­ence between a cold case and an arrest. And in court, phys­i­cal evi­dence usu­ally is more reli­able than witnesses.

Early next year, the crime lab will move into the $22 mil­lion med­ical examiner’s facil­ity in the Strip District, but its cur­rent quar­ters can be tight.

“We’re sit­ting on top of each other,” Dr. Robert Levine, the head of the bal­lis­tics divi­sion, noted before Mr. Onorato jumped in.

“We don’t call that cramped,” the county exec­u­tive said. “We call that being fru­gal with the tax­pay­ers’ money.”