Every Shell a Fingerprint: Northeast Ohio Crime Gun Intelligence Center Will Help Crack Down on Illegal Firearms, Feds Say

Attorney General Merrick Garland, flanked by ATF Director Steven Dettelbach and U.S. Attorney Rebecca Lutzko, at the announcement of Cleveland’s Crime Gun Intelligence Center on Tuesday. Credit: Mark Oprea

On Tuesday afternoon, in a nondescript federal building off Hinckley Parkway, two dozen law enforcement officers from the Cleveland Division of Police, DEA and other agencies gathered to announce the latest regional effort in battling violent crime.

The packed house was more than just symbolic. These two dozen badged men and women were there to usher in the Northeast Ohio Crime Gun Intelligence Center, a ballistics and forensics lab that links together city, state and federal law enforcement to more effectively solve gun-related crimes.

Like Cincinnati’s CGIC, as it’s commonly abbreviated, or the one in Columbus, which opened in September, Northeast Ohio’s will be set up to treat illegal firearms more like forensic items than mere tools created to intimidate or kill.

“Every shell is like a fingerprint,” Cuyahoga County Sheriff Harold Pretel told Scene at the press event. “Every shooting carries a fingerprint that could be matched with a shooting. It’s akin to finding the burglar’s fingerprint in separate houses. Same burglar, different houses.”

Such a center, as speakers Wednesday noted, can greatly truncate the amount of time it takes to get a shell casing from a crime scene analyzed, stored in a database and linked to murders or thefts in previous cases.

Or, in some incidents, be used to foreshadow—and even prevent—future crimes from occurring. A robbery in Cleveland Heights could involve the same Glock that was used, days earlier, in a double homicide in Lorain.

“Sometimes these violent crimes are committed by and involve the same actor, and sometimes they involve the illegal sale from the same or of the same recycled gun,” U.S. Attorney Rebecca Lutzko told press. “Either way, such crimes happen without regard to where one county line or one city limit ends and the next begins.”

There are 60 CBICs set up around the country currently, and all provide forensics data to officers at the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco and Explosives. And all have boasted decent numbers. Cincinnati’s CBIC, after launching July of 2021, led to 217 illegal gun recoveries and 475 arrests in less than a year in operation.

But CBICs, as Attorney General Merrick Garland griped about on Tuesday, carry an aura of political symbolism for right-wing Republicans who see both the ATF and its gun-gathering strategies as overreaches against the right to bear arms. Majorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia representative who’s long called to “eliminate the ATF,” pushed federal legislation last year to “end [the Bureau’s] war on law-abiding gun owners and the Second Amendment.”

Cuyahoga County Sheriff Harold Pretel at the Department of Justice’s briefing on Tuesday. Pretel has been spearheading a Downtown Safety Patrol Unit since last July to further battle crime in the city center. Credit: Mark Oprea

It’s a mindset that’s suffocating to Garland, who lamented the recently-proposed $1 billion cuts to federal law enforcement—which would decimate the ATF and the U.S. Attorneys Office—in the spending bill proposed by the Republican-controlled House. (President Biden wants a seven percent increase in ATF spending.) Especially when, he said, CGICs are not cheap, but do result in noticeable reductions in crime.

“This effort to defund the Justice Department and its essential law enforcement functions will make our fight against violent crime all the more difficult,” Garland told press on Tuesday. “It is unacceptable.”

Officers at Cleveland’s CGIC, which will open in July, will be host to a National Integrated Ballistic Information Network unit, or NIBIN, where forensics officers will work. Bullet casings from crime scenes are observed under digital microscopes, where discreet markings are captured and noted in its database. Fingerprints are taken off the guns themselves. A 3D model is created of both bullet and casing.

ATF Director Steven Dettelbach swore by the practice, which is currently used at 14 NIBIN units across the state. He recalled one gun obtained by Cleveland police last year that was “linked to 14 different shootings” across the city.

“The strategy works,” Dettelbach said.

It’s part of what’s given Sheriff Pretel more confidence in decreasing violent crime around the county and in downtown.

“We need to keep the pressure on so that negative elements will not feel comfortable engaging in disorder downtown,” he told Scene. “And that’s really it. Sometimes it’s crime displacement. But at the end of the day, it’s a disruption of the cycle of violence.”

A disruption for “bad actors who felt very comfortable coming downtown with their firearms that they committed other crimes with,” Pretel added. “And well, now they’re getting caught with those firearms.”

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