‘Ballistic Fingerprinting’ Offers No Quick-Fix Solution
November 1, 2002
by Joseph P. Tartaro
Executive Editor
The recent string of random shootings and murders in the Washington, DC, area has highlighted several facts about our current society.
The first is that there is no such thing as 100% protection—by the government, or anyone else—from the possibility of being victimized by violence. When people can be randomly victimized anytime of the day or night while doing mundane things like buying gas, going to a Home Depot in a mall, or waiting to enter a school, no amount of protective manpower or technology can assure everyone’s safety.
Second, most of the media will say or write anything—no matter how inane or inaccurate—to fill their time slots or pages. Nothing prevents reporters from asking the stupidest questions repeatedly even after they have been told that such questions will not be answered. In addition, practically everyone in the media hopes to make a name for themselves, either by solving the crime as is done in the movies or on TV shows and in novels, or by coming up with the way to prevent such crimes in the future.
Third, everyone in the media and most of the public—as well as ambitious politicians—has come to believe that new technology can solve every problem. They fail to realize that because some new computerized technology exists, it doesn’t mean the world will become a safer place if it is applied.
Ballistic ‘Fingerprints’
One of the big topics filling newspaper and broadcast vacuums is computerized technology applied to forensic ballistics. They call it “ballistic fingerprinting.”
In the wake of the DC-area shootings, most of the media and many politicians act as if they have discovered some secret way to prevent and solve crimes at the push of a computer mouse. Those who already have an axe to grind have even seen fit to blame the National Rifle Association (NRA) for the fact that such technology has not already been required by law. Others ignore all the frailties of such a system and suggest that it be applied anyway “even if it only prevents or solves one crime.”
The truth is that such technology has been around and in limited use for at least five years—in the United States and several other countries—and there is no evidence that it has solved or prevented any crime. It certainly is not a magic wand.
We first reported on the then-relatively new technology of digitized forensic ballistics in early 1998 after a visit to a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) laboratory in Rockville, MD. I also editorialized on the subject in this column in 2000 when New York Gov. George Pataki was pushing legislation to manadate such a system for new handguns shipped into the state.
The software for the program called the Integrated Ballistic Identification System (IBIS) was developed by a Canadian firm and was intended to speed the process by which ballistics technicians and criminalists could match up evidence samples from bullets, bullet fragments and spent cartridge cases retrieved at crime sites. What technicians were doing was not new. It had been previously proven that the lands and grooves of every rifled gun barrel left unique markings on the projectiles that were fired from that gun and that the firing pin, bolt and extractor mechanism impressed distinctive markings on every shell casing. Using that information, skilled analysts had been eye-balling such evidence through comparison microscopes for almost a century before IBIS arrived. But the old method was extremely time-intensive and required actual samples of the evidence and comparison test materials.
How IBIS Works
The IBIS system enables technicians anywhere in the world to digitize and then compare test samples against any newly-gathered evidence—bullets, fragments and casings—or previously digitized database files. The actual samples would not have to be physically present, and the software would allow for much faster computerized comparison and match-ups of the digitized images.
The IBIS system as used by the ATF features master lab centers in at least three key regions of the country which can be accessed by all of the ATF field offices and local law enforcement agencies. It applies modern technological capabilities to a known forensic science.
The problem got more complicated when politicians started playing with the technology. Maryland Gov. Parris Glendening and Pataki exploited this limited-purpose technology to sell their legislatures and public the idea of building digitized databases of bullets and casings from new handguns only, and requiring manufacturers and dealers to supply the file samples with each gun.
Both systems are relatively new—one has been around for two years and the other three. The magic wand idea was that as soon as a bullet or casing was collected at a crime scene it would be checked against the file and lead police to the gun and gunowner who committed the crime.
So far the magic wand has not worked. There have been no reported cases of crimes solved the way Glendening and Pataki promised. And so far no one has come forward with evidence that it works that way in any of the other countries that use the IBIS or a competing system. Those countries include for at least the past five years: Greece, Hong Kong; Israel; Russia; South Africa; Canada; Thailand; Turkey, and Venezuela.
One of the problems is cost, a fact that the Maryland and New York politicians realized, which is why they limited it only to new handguns. The other big problem is that in order to work, it would require a costly universal registration system involving every firearm with a rifled barrel. The third is that changing a barrel or other component of a firearm is likely to change the individual signature of that gun on projectiles and casings. Thus, replacement parts would also have to be registered, and new samples made for every change.
Expert Advice
With over 200 million firearms in this country, such a system would be prohibitively costly, would have to require the gun-owning public to accept and comply with such a massive registration system, and would require recordkeeping and registration for replacement parts.
It is significant that experts oppose such a plan. William J. Vizzard, chair of the Division of Criminal Justice at California State University-Sacramento and retired ATF agent, who is the author of Shots in the Dark: Policy, Politics and Symbolism of Gun Control, writing in the anti-gun Newsday on Oct. 10, cautioned against it.
“. . . Random killings are a homicide investigator’s nightmare.
“Yet the proposal offers no solution in the foreseeable future. A system exclusively for new firearms, combined with a national licensing and registration system, might provide some assistance. But the cost would be substantial. And Congress has shown no interest in serious gun regulation, even when the proposals were far less sweeping than this.”
In spite of such experienced commentary regarding proposals that the US Congress require that such a system be put in place, some politicians are already advocating such a system.
If these quick-fix remedies really worked, perhaps the many closed-circuit surveillance cameras already in place around the country—and especially in the DC area—would already have photos of the lunatic or terrorist who is randomly killing people.
So far the much-vaunted cameras apparently have not helped solved this heinous crime and there is little reason to believe that “ballistic fingerprinting” would prove anymore useful to assuring greater security.
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