A Regional Approach Is Needed to Stop Gun Crime in Mercosur
Posted by Pete Gagliardi on Mon, Dec 05, 2011
This week, UPI published a story about how the South American regional bloc (comprising Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina) is taking aim at small arms suppliers.
The article highlights the problem of escalating armed violence in Latin America’s “Mercosur Region". It identifies one of the obstacles to solving the problem as the: “insufficient coordination and exchange of critical information”.
Armed criminals and their confederates need to be stopped and brought to justice to answer for the crimes they have committed. To do this, governments must put people, processes and technology in place to help police generate the actionable intelligence needed to identify the criminals and apprehend them.
My above point builds on the premise that every crime gun and piece of ballistics evidence has a story to tell and when uncovered the story can lead to police actions of tactical and strategic crime solving and crime prevention value.
For example, ballistics data generated from crime guns has tactical value in that it can help link a gang member’s weapon to a crime or series of crimes across various jurisdictions. In addition, a firearm’s identification markings can be used to trace the history of its legitimate transactions and movements which in turn can help lead police to the criminal(s) who ultimately misused it. This data has strategic value in identifying crime gun patterns and trends for use in developing new crime prevention policies.
Well managed crime gun data can also extend the tactical and strategic crime solving benefits from our hometown communities to our homeland borders.
A good example of well managed crime gun data for generating targeted law enforcement actions directed against armed criminals is the National Ballistics Intelligence Service (NABIS) in the United Kingdom and the National Integrated Ballistics Information Network (NIBN) in the United States.
NABIS and NIBIN balance a combination of people, processes and technology in the application of traditional forensic ballistics skills integrated with intelligence analysis capability. They help to speed up and advance investigations involving the use of firearms by producing timely and actionable leads which investigators rely upon to identify and arrest armed criminals.
The NIBIN program has provided police with additional information in over 80,000 shooting crimes.
The INTERPOL Ballistics Information Network (IBIN) helps to take national programs like NABIS and NIBIN to new and higher levels - the international sharing and comparison of ballistics data. Launched in 2009, IBIN is a public-private partnership between INTERPOL and Forensic Technology Inc. of Montreal, Canada.
IBIN is the “big hammer” to provide the global police community with a common ballistics data sharing network to “nail” armed criminals. With such a network in place, frequently mobile criminals who use firearms to further their illicit activities can no longer escape detection merely by crossing into another jurisdiction or by leaving evidence of their crimes scattered across jurisdictional boundary lines.
IBIN’s greatest potential for crime solving success can be found in situations where gun related violence is most likely to occur and extend across multiple jurisdictions such as the Mercosur Region.
Situations involving:
- Specific border frontier regions (e.g. areas in close proximity to national borders).
- Specific transnational illicit markets (e.g. the trafficking of drugs)
- Specific criminal groups (e.g. transnational gangs, drug cartels, or insurgent/terrorist groups)
The more crimes that are solved and prevented through firearms information sharing, the more value that is generated in terms of peace and justice for all, and the more social benefits derived from the lowering of the overall economic impact of gun violence.
Every day that we wait, a criminal somewhere remains free to shoot and kill again... and the cost of crime on our global society rises ever higher.