DETROIT – Every time a gun is fired, there’s one key piece of evidence that could help police identify the shooter. When guns are fired, they leave a signature mark on the shell casings, and a national database of those marks is helping Detroit police make arrests.
It’s not a new tool, but it’s now being used in a different way. Federal officials said an important database called NIBIN -- the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network -- could prevent some shootings on the streets.
Federal officials call Keontay Provience a serial shooter. In the spring of 2018, police were called to a report of shots fired on San Juan Drive in Detroit. A .40-caliber shell casing was recovered by investigators, and Provience was eventually identified as the possible shooter.
But there wasn’t enough evidence to charge him.
Months later, shots were fired again, and police suspected Provience as the shooter. Detroit police interviewed him, and in court documents he allegedly admitted to shooting a Glock .40-caliber firearm.
Shell casings from both shootings were entered into a national database, and officials learned the shots had been fired from the same gun.
If shooters, such as Provience, haven’t heard of HIBIN, they will soon.
“Essentially, what NIBIN does, is it puts investigators together to allow them to do good old fashioned police work in connecting the dots between seemingly unrelated events that are actually related,” said James M. Deir, an ATF special agent in charge.
Officials are tracing shell casings, leading them to guns and whether or not they have been used in other crimes.
In Provience’s case, federal officials linked the shell casings to one gun. Then, they checked his social media posts that show him posing with a Glock .40-caliber gun. They could see the serial number in the photos.
The investigation added up to a federal charge of having drugs with a firearm while under indictment.
“Well, the big thing is the gun doesn’t lie,” Deir said. “That’s the whole premise of NIBIN, is that at the end of the day we are following the gun. We are not following the individual that’s possessing the gun.”
Detroit police are jumping in and taking a big role in finding shell casings at scenes. They’re recovering guns off the streets -- using the NIBIN database to track the gun, which leads them to the person using the gun.
United States attorney Matthew J. Schneider said the information gained from NIBIN is key to making the streets safer.
“If we find a person today with a gun that is traced through NIBIN and we can trace that through shootings or even murders, we know that that is a bad actor, that that person needs to be off the street and in prison,” Schneider said. "If we didn’t have that evidence, we might not have the full picture about just how dangerous that person is.
“The bottom line is we’re preventing the next victim. We are identifying shooters and getting them before they commit another horrible act that could ultimately end in someone being killed needlessly on the streets of Detroit.”
In four months, 20 shooters have been arrested and 50 shooting patterns have been disrupted, police said.