TAMPA, Florida — The Florida Department of Law Enforcement has just rolled out a new tool to help fight crime in our state. It literally rolled it out.
It’s a first of its kind for Florida, and it's located in Tampa Bay.
The small trailer might not look like much from the outside, but inside is Florida's first mobile ballistics platform — a mobile shooting range capable of collecting shell casings. With it, the FDLE can now test recovered weapons right at the scene of a crime virtually anywhere in the state.
“By being mobile, we can go out. We can process guns on scene; 10 or 15, 20 guns much quicker,” FDLE’s Brannon Sheely said.
Each bullet casing has its own individual marking, just like a fingerprint.
The faster they can be processed and analyzed, the quicker they can be entered into what’s called a BrassTrax imager, which then searches for a ballistics match against a national database called NIBIN.
“Right now, if you come to the lab and physically, bring a gun to our lab for us to examine it, our turnaround times are anywhere from 90 to 100 days. This machine, with the addition of the BrassTrax Machine, could cut that down from anywhere to 12 to 14 hours,” said Mark Brutnell, the Special Agent in Charge of Tampa’s FDLE office.
For now, shell casings still have to be brought back to the FDLE building, but in the next two or three months, the agency plans to also add a portable BrassTrax link to the mobile platform.
That means at large-scale shooting scenes, like those recently in Lakeland and Ybor City, said Brutnell, bullet casings can be collected and placed into the system right there.
“Every minute counts. Every hour counts. Especially when we have these big crime scenes and mass shootings, per se, we really want to get ahead of these as fast as we can,” Brutnell said.
That efficiency allows FDLE technicians to spend more time linking weapons to previous criminal cases and, perhaps, a suspect.
“We're trying to get this information as quickly as possible so we can start connecting these dots,” Sheely said. “Sending these leads out to the police departments, the sheriff’s office, working these leads, and getting these bad guys off the street.”
The mobile platform is based in Tampa because of the number of local police agencies likely to use it and its centralized location.
If it turns out to be in high demand, which they expect it will be, and if it proves to be successful, which, again, they expect it will be, they may consider adding a second one to serve the southern part of the state exclusively.
When it's not processing shell casings at a crime scene, the FDLE says the mobile platform might be brought to local police departments, which could then use it to reduce a backlog of weapons that still need to be tested and entered into the national database.