When a gun homicide or a shooting goes unsolved, it doesn’t just leave a person on the street who could go on to hurt other people.
It leaves families and loved ones in limbo, and deepens community distrust of law enforcement. It also creates an environment where people feel less safe and are more likely to carry guns. Meanwhile, the lack of legal accountability for perpetrators sets the stage for retaliation. The cycle of gun violence repeats and repeats.
For decades, this problem has been getting worse.
Clearance rates for firearm homicides — the percentage of cases that police solve — have been declining nationwide since at least 1980, when law enforcement cleared about two out of every three firearm homicides. Today, just half are solved. That means that if you shot someone in a major city in America, you would have a 50 percent chance of getting away with it. The clearance rate for nonfatal shootings is even lower, with only about one-third being solved.
There are strategies and tools that could — and have — helped. A recent report from the nonpartisan Joyce Foundation pointed to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ crime gun intelligence technologies that enable law enforcement to track guns and connect shell casings at crime scenes. Better use of those tools, Joyce found, could be a key to improving clearance rates, and ultimately reducing gun violence. (The Joyce Foundation provides funding to The Trace. You can find our donor transparency policy here, and our editorial independence policy here.)
But those tools have suffered from underutilization. That’s where Crime Gun Intelligence Centers come in. These hubs foster interagency partnerships to do what routine police work often can’t: track down people who repeatedly pull the trigger.
Local police, state agencies, and federal authorities like the ATF work side by side at the intelligence centers, sharing real-time data to solve and prevent gun crimes. They’re essentially a law enforcement “brain trust” for tackling shootings, with a special focus on linking incidents across jurisdictions, tracing the movement of firearms, and building cases against repeatedly violent offenders.
By centralizing these efforts and coordinating data entry and analysis, intelligence centers help law enforcement not only solve past crimes but also disrupt future ones before they happen.
“It’s bringing in all of the data on the weapons and the gun violence incidents and bringing it into one place for analysis to occur, to start thinking about different strategies for intervention or suppression,” Mallory O’Brien, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University, told me.
Intelligence centers have expanded rapidly across the country. In 2015, there were just two precursors to the centers in Denver and Milwaukee, where O’Brien helped develop the concept. In 2016, the Department of Justice began funding an expansion through grants, bringing the number up to at least 19 by 2020. And today, there are at least 54 Crime Gun Intelligence Centers in 26 states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia.
The intelligence centers help increase participation in two of the ATF’s key information systems: the National Integrated Ballistics Information Network, or NIBIN, and eTrace.
NIBIN helps link the shell casings of bullets to the firearms that fired them, often revealing patterns across multiple shootings. It’s somewhat like a fingerprint system for firearms: When someone shoots a gun, imperfections from the manufacturing process cause the internal components of the gun to leave unique markings on the spent shell casings. When those casings are recovered at crime scenes, law enforcement can enter them into NIBIN, which compares them with millions of others across the country. This system has linked shootings that may have otherwise seemed unrelated, identifying a firearm used in multiple crimes — and potentially the same shooter involved in several incidents.
“You can identify, based on the shell casings, the most prolific and currently active shooter in your city,” Mark Kraft, a retired ATF special agent who has been heavily involved in advising new intelligence centers, told me. “So, if you target these shooters, your crime has to go down. It just has to.”
eTrace plays a different, but equally important, role. It helps law enforcement track the ownership history of a firearm to where the gun was originally purchased legally, and by whom. Those details can help investigators identify straw purchasers (buyers who purchase guns on behalf of people legally barred from owning them), gun traffickers, and unscrupulous gun dealers. In other words, eTrace can provide the beginnings of a road map for investigators, often leading to the source of illegal firearms in communities.
Together, these tools allow intelligence centers to take a proactive approach — targeting the most dangerous shooters, cutting off illegal gun supply chains, and preventing violence before it escalates. If the intelligence is used well, police can also avoid wasting resources targeting innocent people on the street who may have never been involved in any shootings.
“We’re not targeting people because they’re members of the gang,” Kraft said. “We’re identifying the gun that was used more times in a shorter period of time than other guns in the city, and then we’re going to backtrack and figure out who that person is.”
Some evidence shows that Crime Gun Intelligence Centers have been successful in improving clearance rates, potentially reducing gun violence along the way.
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Take Milwaukee, for example. A 2019 evaluation of Milwaukee’s intelligence center found that the clearance rate for nonfatal shootings with a NIBIN lead went up from 23 percent in 2014 to 36 percent in 2017. That was a significantly higher rate than for nonfatal shootings without a NIBIN lead.
“What we’ve seen is that when your clearance rates go up — when you’re apprehending the individuals involved in shootings — you begin to see the actual number of incidents go down,” said O’Brien, the researcher who worked on information sharing in Milwaukee.
In Phoenix, implementing a Crime Gun Intelligence Center led to a 36 percent increase in the clearance rate for homicides and significant improvements for aggravated assaults and gun possession cases. Similarly, an evaluation of the intelligence center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, found a 150 percent increase in firearm-related arrests after increasing its NIBIN entries.
But it can be hard to draw a straight line between the centers and citywide reductions in violence. Intelligence centers are relatively new, originating around a decade ago, and though the evidence so far is promising, there hasn’t been enough academic research to definitively link them to lower rates of gun violence. It’s also difficult to disentangle the centers from the tools they use, like NIBIN and eTrace. And though NIBIN sites and intelligence centers often overlap, NIBIN stations exist in other facilities, too, including ATF labs, state and local crime labs, and police departments.
Despite their success, Crime Gun Intelligence Centers face some significant challenges. First, they’re expensive to set up and run. Even with federal grants, local agencies need to supply their own personnel, and the NIBIN machines aren’t cheap. Training analysts to use these tools also takes time and resources.
There’s also the problem of scale: Though the intelligence centers have undergone a rapid expansion, they serve only a tiny fraction of the more than 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States. And this means most cities, especially smaller ones, frequently don’t have access to these advanced crime-fighting tools. Even though the centers often serve as regional hubs, 24 states have no Crime Gun Intelligence Center.
The numbers also align with law enforcement participation in NIBIN and eTrace outside of the intelligence center context. In 23 states, fewer than half of law enforcement agencies used eTrace in 2021, and there are still only 298 sites in the country with a NIBIN station.
While the amount of ballistic evidence in NIBIN has more than doubled since 2017, “many participating agencies are still not entering evidence comprehensively, and some agencies are not entering evidence at all,” the Joyce Foundation report found.
Then there’s the federal funding issue. The ATF, which runs NIBIN and eTrace, has been chronically underfunded for years, and a shortage of money, agents, and analysts could hinder existing intelligence centers and make it more difficult to get new centers up and running.
“Maybe they don’t have an ATF agent they can work directly with. Maybe there aren’t enough analysts to help with utilizing some of the data,” O’Brien said. “So that is where there’s probably an issue of not appropriately funding ATF.”
Despite those challenges, intelligence centers are proving to be a critical tool in law enforcement’s work to reduce gun violence. But their potential doesn’t stop there. These intelligence centers could also offer valuable information to non-law enforcement partners, like community violence intervention programs.
“People aren’t sharing NIBIN data. They’re not sharing eTrace data,” often out of concern that it could hinder or compromise active investigations, O’Brien told me. But aggregate data and selectively sharing lower-level information could unlock new strategies for preventing violence before it happens.
That could ultimately mean a future in which intelligence centers work alongside community-based organizations to get a full picture of where guns are coming from and how to stop the flow, while employing strategies outside of arrest and incarceration.
“When we’re talking with community violence interrupters, when we’re talking with community members, when we’re talking with community-based organizations,” O’Brien said, “crime gun intelligence is another set of information for people to be processing to really think about new strategies.”
