In the News

Loading guns for crime leads with new technology

Officers shoot bullets to link them to other crimes | By Christine Reid
Originally posted on www.dailycamera.com

Matt Stokan, left, and Roger Briden dig a bullet out of a tank filled with cotton in an evidence room at the Boulder County Justice Center earlier this month. The bullet-capture tank allows officers to shoot weapons and enter the markings left on bullets -- much like fingerprints -- into a national crime database.

It's not Superman -- but it can stop bullets without damaging them.

The Boulder County Sheriff's Office's bullet-capture tank, a 450-pound steel cylinder the size of a washing machine, is designed to trap bullets unharmed so that the unique markings left on them from the barrel of a gun can be logged into a national database with hopes of matching the weapon to other crimes.

The tank has been put to good use since its purchase for $6,714 this summer.

Deputies are shooting bullets from the 500 or so weapons that fill the evidence room and entering their specimens, with help from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, into the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network.

Sheriff Joe Pelle said the technology maps the notches and grooves left on bullets after they are fired through the barrel of a gun, which wears over time and has unique markings.

"It's essentially like a fingerprint," Pelle said.

The national database -- kept since 2001 by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives -- has more than 1.3 million bullets entered, and more than 20,000 "hits" have been made, the agency reports on its Web site.

Colorado Bureau of Investigation officials began a push in late 2004 to get agencies across the state to submit bullet or shell evidence they've collected from crime scenes, or send weapons to them to fire in their capture tanks. CBI technicians take the bullets and digitally map the markings so the information can be fed into the national database.

The Boulder County Sheriff's Office's buying a tank itself to collect the evidence is a "very proactive" step toward solving crimes, CBI deputy director Pete Mang said.

"Kudos for Boulder County putting the time and energy into this," Mang said.

He said of the three main national forensic databases, which also include fingerprint and DNA data warehouses,the ballistic network has been the most successful in the shortest amount of time. CBI has gotten 60 hits already, Mang said.

"Those are pretty significant investigative leads, leads that wouldn't have been available otherwise," he said. "People don't throw their guns away -- they use them from case to case."

Sheriff's Cmdr. Phil West said reserve officers who volunteer for the department have submitted about 70 pieces of evidence to CBI, and a couple of dozen have been entered into the national database so far. The guns being tested are linked to murders, assaults or robberies, or were seized during domestic-violence cases.

The capture tank is portable, so other agencies in the county can use it, West said.

Contact Camera Staff Writer Christine Reid at 303-473-1355 or reidc@dailycamera.com.