Thomas Breen photo
Public Safety Committee Chair and Beaver Hills Alder Brian Wingate on Monday.
The Board of Alders unanimously signed off on spending nearly $145,000 to acquire a ballistic analysis machine for the New Haven Police Department.
Local legislators took that vote Monday night during the latest regular bimonthly meeting of the full Board of Alders. The meeting took place in person in the Aldermanic Chamber on the second floor of City Hall.
The alders unanimously voted in support of an order authorizing the police department to purchase a National Integrated Ballistic Information Network (NIBIN) Cartridge Cases And Triage Package from Ultra Electronics Forensic Technology Inc. for $144,853.
According to a recent presentation to the police commission by now-retired former Acting Police Chief Renee Dominguez, that NIBIN system will assist with technology-driven firearms investigations without requiring that bullet casings first travel from New Haven to other municipalities. The funds for the purchase came from a federal Gun Crime Intelligence Center grant that the police department landed last year.
Beaver Hills Alder and Public Safety Committee Chair Brian Wingate urged his colleagues to support the NIBIN purchase as further an effort to “make our community and residents safer” by ensuring that “we will now have in house our own ballistic tracking system.”
In the same vote with which they approved the NIBIN purchase, the alders also OK’d accepting a foam donation for the fire department, applying to the state for a grant to improve police and fire radio coverage on the west side of town, and accepting the donation of a new service dog for the police department from a group called Puppies Behind Bars.
“The purpose of this grant is to improve the Department’s capacity to work with its Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) partners and other law enforcement and community agencies,” Dominguez wrote in a March 24 letter to the alders in support of the NIBIN purchase.
“This group uses intelligence, technology, and community engagement to identify unlawfully used firearms and their sources, and to effectively prosecute perpetrators engaged in violent crime. Two elements are key to this approach: collecting guns and ballistic evidence from all crime scenes (including incidents in which shots are fired at buildings, vehicles, street signs, etc., but don’t strike anyone) and quickly analyzing that evidence using modern technology.”
Dominguez also wrote that the NHPD is currently sending cartridge casing evidence to a forensic laboratory in Meriden. “This is time-consuming in terms of travel and waiting for results. Having the NIBIN Package at headquarters will enable us to process evidence more quickly and will significantly enhance investigations and arrests.”
Click here and here to read more about NHPD’s purchase of the NIBIN machine. Click here and here to read about how a NIBIN match between a casing and a gun is not necessarily a certain identification.
If the personnel who operated the new ballistic analysis machine don’t have adequate forensic training to accurately interpret the results, then I’m afraid we will have false evidence identification that may put the wrong person behind bars. The city NHPD better send the staff who will be using this machine to intensive training in how to correctly use this machine for accurate identification.