The Albuquerque Police Department is receiving some backup from their federal partner at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in the form of a mobile National Integrated Ballistics Information Network bus.
Called the NIBIN bus for short, this is the latest tool the department is using to combat gun crimes in the city.
This bus contains all of the necessary components needed to process ballistics evidence from crime scenes that arrived at the APD crime lab recently.
With the capability to operate independently, the bus also contains a NIBIN machine, a data link, a test firing apparatus and a generator.
Established in 1997, the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network housed within the bus allows it to compare images of submitted ballistics evidence from shooting scenes and recovered firearms and produces a list of similar results.
Trained NIBIN technicians can then conduct a correlation review of these results, identify NIBIN leads or potential association between two or more pieces of ballistic evidence based on a review of digital images in the NIBIN database.
The data is then compiled into an intelligence report that can be used for investigations and court cases.
Albuquerque Police Chief Harold Medina said this tool has been useful in the investigations of shootings in the city.
“The message to the criminals is this, we have shotspotter that is going to alert us that shots have been fired, we dispatch civilian technicians the next day to look for those shell casings if our officers don’t find them that night, we’re one of the best agencies in the country at finding those shell casings and getting those initial casing into the system. We want to be the center of where shell casings come in the Metro area.”
The City of Albuquerque and the department currently have two other NIBIN machines currently in operation outside of the ones located in the bus, and Medina said the department has goals to reach out to other law enforcement agencies around the state to offer the NIBIN services to them.