Federal law enforcement agencies and the Oglala Sioux Tribe have partnered to add the ammunition casing signatures of more than 500 firearms seized in criminal investigations on the Pine Ridge Reservation into a federal weapons database.
In clearing the backlog of untested firearms, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of South Dakota hopes to find clues in unsolved cases on the reservation.
Every entry in the database could help move investigations toward closure for families who’ve lost loved ones, according to Ron Parsons, U.S. attorney for South Dakota.
The FBI investigates felony-level crimes that occur on tribal land; U.S. attorney’s offices prosecute the cases. Parsons spoke of the high number of missing and murdered Indigenous people cases in South Dakota, and said the ballistics testing will help the FBI and his office meet their obligation to attend to them.
“The full weight of federal forensic capability is being brought to bear on cases that have waited far too long for answers,” Parsons said on Tuesday.
Parsons’ comments at a federal law enforcement facility in Rapid City came one day after agents with the FBI began to fire off hundreds of rounds of ammunition on the Pine Ridge Reservation, work that will continue for the next few weeks. The casings were given to a mobile Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives lab for entry into that agency’s National Integrated Ballistic Information Network.
The network has resulted in more than a million investigative leads on unresolved gun crimes, according to a press release from the FBI.
The initiative, dubbed “Operation Ballistic Backlog,” is part of a larger-scale expansion of federal policing resources in tribal areas called “Operation Steadfast Promise.” Among other efforts, the latter put 70 FBI agents into rotation for temporary detail in tribal areas across the U.S. and stepped up efforts to prosecute fraud involving tribal dollars.
Ballistics like a fingerprint
Firearms leave the equivalent of fingerprints on spent ammunition casings, according to Spence Burnett, assistant special agent in charge for the St. Paul field office of the ATF.
The microscopic marks left when guns are fired can be used to match casings to firearms seized by law enforcement and cataloged by the ATF’s National Tracing Center, and can then serve as evidence in criminal trials.
“No two firearms are the same,” Burnett said.
The network was launched in 1999, but Burnett said after the press conference that not every seized firearm logged in the National Tracing Center database is linked to a shell casing signature in the network.
There’s no cost to enter 3D images of casing signatures into the network’s database, or for law enforcement agencies to access the information. But for signatures to be logged, agencies first need to fire the weapons, collect the casings and send them in for inclusion. That can be a logistical challenge for any agency, he said, particularly ones with heavy caseloads.
You can read the full article at South Dakota Searchlight.