Des Moines police have become the first department in Iowa to install an in-house system to analyze and match shell casings to firearms, equipment officials said will assist detectives in solving gun crimes sooner.

During a news conference Monday, police officials said the machine that accesses a federally-run ballistic imaging network will allow investigators to connect evidence found at shooting scenes to possible suspects months sooner.

"This is a big day for us," Police Chief Dana Wingert said on the front steps of the police department, saying the equipment gives his detectives a "leg up" in investigating gun offenses. "Big day, I think, for central Iowa."

The machine, recently installed at the force's second-floor crime scene investigation laboratory, was set up through a grant with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. It allows trained personnel to take digital images of markings on fired cartridges and compare them to evidence logged in the ATF's National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, or NIBIN.

The installation makes Des Moines police the first department in the state to have the equipment in its own building. Before the department received the grant, the state crime lab in Ankeny handled gun-tracing analysis for each department in Iowa, something Wingert called a "huge undertaking" for its employees.

Generally speaking, Wingert said it can take several months for the state crime lab to return testing results. Now, his detectives hope to get their own results in 24 to 48 hours, a key time frame when investigating gun crimes.

With three of 12 crime lab investigators trained on how to use the equipment, Des Moines police plan to use the machine for neighboring departments, the chief said. Officials plan to analyze recent gun crimes and work backward.

Sgt. Paul Parizek, a police spokesman, said the equipment will assist the rest of Iowa as Des Moines police send fewer pieces of evidence to add to the state lab's backlog. Detectives in the capital city sent more than 1,000 pieces of evidence to the Ankeny facility last year, a figure Parizek expected to be cut to about 100 in the future.

"The rest of it we can do here," he said, describing the equipment as looking similar to a copier and allowing detectives to "associate ballistics with bad guys and guns with crimes."

A national database, NIBIN allows law enforcement to compare ballistic evidence across the country by collecting images of unique markings on casings. More than 3 million pieces of evidence have been logged since the system was created in the 1990s, confirming at least 110,000 "hits," the ATF reported earlier this year.

A NIBIN lead can become a confirmed hit when two firearm examiners, using a comparison microscope, agree the same weapon fired the cases.

In Des Moines, for example, NIBIN connected one gun to four drive-by shootings last summer, Parizek said. He said the technology is similar to DNA, evidence he described as "gold nuggets" in investigations.

Except for installation costs, the police department received the machine for free, making the force one of more than 160 NIBIN sites throughout the country. Des Moines police already track other data in-house, such as fingerprints.

The announcement comes a year after Des Moines ended 2017 with 25 homicides, the most slayings in the city since 1978 when 27 people were killed, according to police data. Of the 25 homicides, 15 people were shot, authorities said.

So far this year, Des Moines police have recorded eight homicides, down from 24 by this time in 2017. Of the eight killed, six people were shot; three of those killings were labeled self-defense by authorities.

During a previous interview with the Register, Wingert said his officers seize guns every night. But more than 20 years ago, if an officer recovered a weapon, most of the patrol division heard about it, he has said.

In a contributed opinion column Monday, U.S. Attorney Marc Krickbaum, who handles cases in the southern district of Iowa, said the number of guns seized by Des Moines police officers has increased by more than 200 percent in the last five years.

And some of those seizures include officers taking firearms from teenagers, some of whom bring them to school, Polk County Attorney John Sarcone has said. Other cases involve stolen weapons.

It took Des Moines police several months to secure the grant that U.S. Rep. David Young called highly competitive. As technology advances, Parizek was confident detectives would arrest more shooters.

Asked what he would say to a possible gunman now that the force has the new equipment, the police spokesman responded: "We're going to catch you."

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