SYSTEM TAKES AIM AT TOUGH GUN CASES
Contra Costa County crime lab a leader in use of gun and bullet data; seen as key in jailing gang members that terrorized East Bay in 2016
The criminals terrorizing the East Bay suburbs were getting bolder.
They robbed a Fremont family at gunpoint. They broke into another house with pistols drawn. They shot an Orinda school board member and beat her husband as the couple unloaded groceries in their driveway.
For weeks in the summer of 2016, police struggled to gather enough evidence to crack the case. Then one of the criminals tossed a gun into a commuter lot near the freeway. Police brought that gun — a Glock — to the Contra Costa crime lab, where technicians used a sophisticated ballistics database to link it to shell casings from three other recent shootings, including the one that left the school board member hospitalized.
In the end, investigators connected the weapon to a violent gang dubbed the “Swerve Team.” The gang was linked to a crime spree that included three murders, 14 attempted murders, six armed robberies and two carjackings, prosecutors said. And eight suspects ended up in jail.
“The gun was the first link,” said Robert Pamplona, a senior inspector on the county’s Safe Streets Task
Force.
Law enforcement departments across the country have access to the same system that Contra Costa has been using to catch the people committing gun crimes on its streets. It’s known as the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, NIBIN for short, and it’s maintained by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
NIBIN is like a giant fingerprint database, but for guns, which when fired leave unique markings on each shell casing they eject. By entering images of fresh casings into the system, investigators can make matches to those already on file, connecting different shootings to the same gun, and from there to shooters or gangs.
But NIBIN only works if police as-
siduously log all the casings they recover, and do so quickly, before trails grow cold. In many cities and counties, that’s not happening. Studies show many police departments and crime labs are misusing NIBIN or not using it at all.
“Research has consistently shown that police investigators often do not receive forensic evidence testing results until after their investigation has concluded,” a team from Sam Houston State University in Texas wrote in the Journal of Forensic Sciences last year. “These time lags prevent investigators from using this critical evidence in the manner that we expect it to be used: to assist in identifying suspects in criminal cases.”
The Contra Costa crime lab’s proficiency with NIBIN is the result of protocols put into place by its no-excuses director. Those procedures also have made it an exception. In partnership with NBC Bay Area, The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence, surveyed California’s 18 city and county crime laboratories. On average, they report taking three months to enter evidence into NIBIN and get back leads. That’s more than 15 times as long as Contra Costa.
In the Bay Area, the San Francisco Police Department Crime Lab last year processed bullet casings up to 95 days after police collected them. The Santa Clara Crime lab reports that it takes “months to a year” to run casings through NIBIN and look for leads. Both labs say they are working to narrow that window, and San Francisco says so far this year, its average turnaround time is about eight days.
The San Mateo crime lab does not track how long it takes to turn NIBIN cases around, but an official there said they had used the technology to crack important cases, including one in 2014 that led to the indictment of 16 people from three different gangs on charges that included murder and drug trafficking.
At least three California counties — Fresno, Ventura and Orange — are not using NIBIN at all.
“If a lead is taking eight months to get into hands of investigators, it’s worthless,” said Sam Rabadi, who was head of the firearms division at ATF in 2012 and 2013 and who now works for Vigilant Solutions, a private investigative technology
company. “The overarching goal is to get to the shooter before they shoot again.”
Public officials are desperate for more ways to link guns to shooters. About two out of every five murders in the U.S. go unsolved, according to the FBI. Solve rates for nonfatal shootings are in the single digits in several major cities.
Contra Costa County used to be among the many jurisdictions underperforming in their use of NIBIN. Then, in 2015, a former San Francisco detective named Pamela Hofsass took over as director of its crime lab. Without an influx of funding or manpower, she transformed how her department taps the technology’s potential. The results she achieved helped shift how law enforcement throughout the county approaches solving gun crimes.
Hofsass dramatically cut the time it took to get NIBIN leads back to sheriff’s deputies and local police officers. That, in turn, helped them make more arrests, giving them greater
incentives to pick up shell casings at shootings and bring them to the lab.
“Back in the day, when there was a shooting where no one was hurt, the officer might have kicked those casings into the curb,” Hofsass says. “They thought, there’s no blood here, no injured victims, there’s nothing. Now we know that the people who end up killing people usually start by shooting randomly.”
Ron Nichols, a former ATF NIBIN head who is widely credited with redesigning the agency’s protocols to get faster results, said the changes that Hofsass wrought are possible for any department.
“It’s less about money and resources and more about getting labs to change their mindset about how they do things,” he said.
Ballistic investigations used to be an analog business. Firearm examiners would take Polaroid pictures of cartridge casings and store them in paper files. When a new shooting happened, they would pull out the photographs and eyeball them for matches.
About 20 years ago, the
ATF launched NIBIN and brought the art of ballistics comparisons into the digital age.
These days, after police send shell casings to a crime lab, staffers load them one at a time into an imaging machine, which takes photographs and uploads them into the database. A gun collected as evidence goes through its own procedure. Technicians test-fire it into a water tank, then gather the casings and enter them into NIBIN.
The ATF now touts NIBIN as a cornerstone of its national crime-fighting operation. The agency maintains 179 NIBIN sites across the country, serving 3,000 law enforcement organizations. The system contains about 2.8 million images of shell casings.
But laggards remain, leaving blind spots in the system. As of 2016, according to The Marshall Project, 11 states didn’t have a single NIBIN machine. Another 19 had only one or two.
When Hofsass took over the Contra Costa County crime lab in 2015, there was a backlog of more than 700 shell casings — some from homicides and attempted homicides — waiting to be scanned. On average, it took well over a year for the lab to get back to police with the results of a ballistics test.
Hofsass understood from her own experience as a detective that the lab had to do better.
“We had to think about what the detectives really need — to streamline it and strip it down,” she said. “So that’s what we did. We overhauled the whole process.”
On her watch, Hofsass resolved, technicians
would get detectives leads within at least four days of the shooting — two days to get the evidence to NIBIN, another two to get the lead back from the ATF. But first, she had to get her staff onboard.
Prior to Hofsass’ arrival, “We were just functioning to put out fires right before things went to trial,” said Donnie Finley, her chief deputy. “Some days her message went over better than others. I remember people saying, ‘We can’t do that, we don’t have enough people.’ ”
Investigators who primarily worked crime scenes were taught how to enter evidence into NIBIN on the side. Latent fingerprint examiners were shown how to record the make, model and function of crime guns when ballistics tests got backed up.
Hofsass bought iPads to replace the paperwork that lab technicians had been doing by hand. Lab workers who used to draw pictures of shell cases and their markings now snapped photos instead.
She also asked for help from the ATF. At many local police labs, in-house criminalists do the initial sideby-side comparisons between shell casings they’ve entered into NIBIN and possible matches that the computer returns. That’s important work, but it’s also time-consuming.
In Contra Costa, and at 19 other labs across the country, those first matches are now made by ATF technicians based in Huntsville, Alabama, according to public documents. Hofsass said that’s been a huge help streamlining her process and opens up time her technicians can use to button cases up when they are ready to go to trial.
The ATF says it wants to do image comparisons for more agencies. Officials have said ATF plans to expand this service to as many as 30 additional sites next year.
The ATF also loaned Contra Costa two technicians to help test-fire about 600 crime guns that had been sitting in storage and get that ballistic information into the NIBIN system.
Today, Hofsass’ team is caught up. And when Hofsass hears that efficient lab work helped to make an arrest or clear a suspect, she broadcasts that information to her staff, to make sure they know the work they’re doing matters.
“I’m saying there’s a way to be efficient, effective and maintain your quality,” she said. “We’re here to make the world a safer place. So why would you want to take your time?”
When Josh Medel, then a senior intelligence analyst for the FBI/Contra Costa County Safe Streets Task Force, heard about what Hofsass was doing, he called the lab and asked for a year’s worth of the data it had collected.
As an intelligence analyst in Iraq, Medel had studied satellite images, drone data and classified reports to figure out what opposition leaders were planning. Back home, he used crime reports, social media and cellphone data to predict what Contra Costa’s gangs might do next.
He mapped out a sprawling diagram of the county’s gun crime: which guns were connected to which shootings, and which gang members might be connected to those guns — valuable information for prosecutors in California, where gang affiliation can mean longer prison sentences. In some cases, the webs sprawled to dozens of incidents.
On the day of the carjacking that broke the Swerve Team case, police testfired the gun that the suspect ditched in the commuter lot and entered the spent casings into NIBIN. When the ATF sent initial matches back, the results showed that three other recent shootings might have been done with the same weapon.
Investigators then gathered surveillance videos, GPS, DNA and cellphone data looking for other ties between the four shootings. They plugged that material into Medel’s map to figure out where this particular crime spree might fit in with wider county trends. In the end, the team linked 16 guns to 42 different shootings. Police also said they confiscated more than 200 illegal guns as a result of the investigation.
Eight men were charged in the crimes, including Jermaine Hicks, Tarell Brown, Ronald Fluker, Tommie Woods, Bobby Ray Williams, Marrico Williams, Cardell Waters and Torion Young. All have pleaded not guilty and are awaiting trial.
The headlines, and the fact that ballistics leads were key, got the attention of police at departments large and small across the Bay Area.
“Cops started saying, ‘Wow, maybe we need to clear out our evidence room,’ ” Medel said.