The ATF, charged with policing the gun industry, lets dealers get away with falsifying records and selling firearms without background checks.
The programs, policies, and people driving positive change in America’s gun violence problem.
American lives, shaped by guns.
The National Rifle Association is one of the most powerful special interest groups in America. We’re investigating how it spends its money.
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How We Fix This
Years ago, most detectives stopped trying to retrieve fingerprints from shell casings. A new method, touted as 25 times better, could change that.
Law Enforcement
After gunfire erupted at a community event in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn on the evening of July 27, officers with the New York Police Department had a choice to make: Wait for an ambulance to arrive and transport victims…
Community Violence
Feds say nearly a third of firearms recovered in the state are homemade, unserialized, and untraceable.
The city that set the bar for sharing ballistic intel is pushing its successful approach regionwide.
To curb homicides, Eric Jones started by having the Stockton, California PD focus on repairing its relationship with residents. “More than ever, I see trust in police connected to reducing violent crime.”
Criminologists thought it was impossible to get DNA off of shell casings, but a technique pioneered in the Netherlands is having notable results.
ATF
A push by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to improve gun crime investigations has been hindered by local police departments that fail to trace guns or to promptly enter shell casings into a national ballistics…
We set out to determine how domestic killers in South Carolina got their guns. Instead, we found evidence of a widespread breakdown of critical crime-fighting intel.
Missing Pieces
After being contacted by The Trace’s reporters, the Atlanta Police Department clamped down on officers whose behavior contributed to the loss or theft of a department-issued firearm. Under a new policy adopted this month, officers who violate the department’s rules…
An investigation by The Trace shows that police departments’ uneven storage rules have put deadly weapons into the hands of criminals.
A national database of shell casings has been deployed unevenly. So the DOJ is encouraging lawyers who want to use it to link and crack cases.
Criminal Justice
New Jersey and Delaware have laws mandating that investigators use an innovative ballistics system called NIBIN. The other 48 states don’t — and their reticence makes it harder to ID shooters everywhere.
When I first learned that investigators can look at tiny marks on shell casings from bullets to get leads on gun crimes that plague neighborhoods across the country, I had to see for myself. Read Next…
Propelled by a new, no-nonsense boss, Contra Costa County ditched the excuses that keep many law enforcement agencies from taking better advantage of a crime-fighting database called NIBIN.
We’ve noticed that this story from February 2018 is receiving a surge of traffic in 2020. Annual statistics on police officers killed in the line of duty can be found on this page of the FBI’s Uniform Crime…
