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.
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Community Violence
Feds say nearly a third of firearms recovered in the state are homemade, unserialized, and untraceable.
How We Fix This
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…
Law Enforcement
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…
Extremism
Police in Arkansas say nine of the 44 people arrested in a drug and weapons investigation this Wednesday were member of local white-supremacist gangs. Twenty-five pounds of methamphetamine and 69 firearms were seized in the operation, the latest of many…
The city is ramping up its efforts to collect genetic material. But the absence of oversight alarms forensic and legal experts.
