A former crime analyst and a former ATF task officer on why speed, not data alone, is what solves gun crime
Before joining Mark43, we spent years on opposite ends of the same problem. Alex was the first crime analyst assigned to the joint ATF-NYPD Crime Gun Intelligence Center, later worked on the NESS platform, and traveled the country training agencies on crime gun intelligence for the ATF. Adam worked patrol, then served as a task force officer with the ATF, running traces and building gun cases in the field. We came at crime gun data from different roles. We reached the same conclusion: the intelligence is almost always there. What determines whether it solves a case is how quickly it reaches investigators and whether they can use it to connect the dots.
A gun has a criminal history. Most agencies never read it.
There are two questions a firearm can answer. A trace tells you the life of a gun: who first bought it, and when and where it was recovered by police. That matters, but it is only part of the story.
The more valuable question is how the gun lived in between. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) National Integrated Ballistic Information Network (NIBIN) is what fills that in. It tells you the gun’s life of crime: every scene where its casings were collected and every shooting it touched. With trace and ballistic data together in one place you start seeing a criminal history. People, crimes, locations, timelines, and patterns.
Alex: When I got to NYPD’s Crime Gun Intelligence Center, I learned something that surprised me, even though I was already inside the building. Every recovered firearm was being traced and all ballistic evidence was getting submitted into NIBIN, yet most officers had no idea. The data existed, but it was not getting back to the people who could act on it.
Key takeaway: Tracing a gun is only half the picture. Make sure every recovered firearm goes into both eTrace and NIBIN, and that the results reach investigators, not just the lab.
Timeliness is the difference between intelligence and history
Alex: When I started, NYPD was relying on confirmed NIBIN hits, which require lab confirmation under a microscope, and traces that could take six months to come back. An investigator often had to suspect two shootings were related before asking the lab to compare them. That meant you were guessing before you could even ask the right question. Around 2020 and 2021, the switch to NIBIN leads changed everything. NYPD went from under 300 confirmed hits a year to over 2,200 leads a year. Instead of waiting six months, investigators were notified within 48 hours. That was not just a workflow improvement. It was the difference between intelligence and justice.
Adam: Timeliness matters because of what can happen during the delay. A month of waiting gives people time to coordinate stories, build alibis, go quiet, or commit more gun crime. Versus 48 hours, investigators can still act before the story hardens.
I had a case where the trace came back within a couple of days. I drove straight to the girlfriend’s house and talked to her before she and the suspect could get their story straight. He had told me he did not know where the gun came from, and that he found it in the back of his car. The trace said his girlfriend bought it. Because the information came back fast, I could move before everyone coordinated. Two months later, I would have gotten the same rehearsed story from everyone.
Alex: Timeliness can change what a confession looks like. In Miami, which runs one of the best crime intelligence centers in the country, a suspect might claim he had a gun for three months, not knowing investigators can already see it was used in a shooting two weeks earlier, feeding his own timeline into the trap. That only works when intelligence is current; six months later, it is history, not intelligence.
Key takeaway: Track time-to-lead as a metric. If it runs to weeks or months, the intelligence is landing too late to change an interview, preserve video, or make an arrest.
Fast only matters if you can see the pattern
Adam: Speed alone is not enough. Fast data still has to be readable. The first time I saw a NIBIN return, I was still on patrol and pulled an old case out of curiosity. It made no sense. Exhibit one connects to exhibit three. Gun A was at scenes one and two, gun B was at two and three, gun A was not at three but was back on another scene with gun C. On a lead sheet, that is almost useless. You need a picture.
I have rolled butcher paper across a conference table at the ATF office to figure out how a cluster of shootings connected. We knew they were connected. We could not see how. Fifty casings at one scene might represent five guns that have changed hands across dozens of incidents. No one can untangle that from paper fast enough to make it operational.
Alex: And when you do untangle it, the picture is bigger than anyone expects. One city used ballistic data to work out that around 80 percent of its shootings traced back to just 18 firearms over a 15 to 20-year span. The same guns, over and over. Once you know that, you stop treating each shooting as isolated and start targeting the guns and people driving the violence.
I ran the same exercise for agencies around the country to show them what was sitting in their own data. For one sheriff’s department, guns active in a single recent year represented more than a quarter of all the crime guns in the county. Nearly three-quarters were used across jurisdictional lines, including out of state. Agencies do not call the department across the street to ask if they also had a shooting with a 9mm. NIBIN can make that connection for them.
Alex: Here is what timely, connected data looks like when it lands. A teenager was shot and killed in a parking lot. I searched the case number and immediately saw that both guns used to kill him had leads attached. One had been used in a robbery 13 hours earlier, a case the sheriff’s department was already investigating separately. Without that connection, no one is likely to look at a robbery where a gun went off and think, that is my murder weapon from 13 hours later in another jurisdiction. And if the lead comes too late, the store’s camera footage may already be gone.
Adam: That is exactly it. The second you see that link, your first move is to race for the video before it gets overwritten. Timeliness decides whether the evidence still exists when you go looking for it.
That is why timely crime gun data has to be both fast and connected. A lead that arrives in 48 hours can change an interview, preserve video, connect jurisdictions, and show investigators which guns are driving the violence. A lead that arrives months later may still be accurate, but by then it is often just a record of what could have been done.
Key takeaways:
• Target the guns, not just the incidents. A small number of firearms drive a disproportionate share of shootings across jurisdictions, so prioritize the repeat guns your data already flags.
• When a lead surfaces, act on it the same day. Perishable evidence like surveillance video gets overwritten within days, so a connection you find a week late is worthless.
Participation is not the same as timeliness
The barriers to crime gun intelligence remain consistent: limited resources, manual entry, disconnected systems, and officers who never see the payoff.
Adam: On patrol, I filled out and faxed ATF trace forms and never learned what came back. It felt like one more piece of paperwork with no visible outcome, so a lot of officers skipped it. When I became an ATF task force officer, I learned there was a web portal for traces, but I still had to transcribe handwritten copies, then call officers to confirm details. I would not enter a trace I knew was bad or incomplete data.
Alex: The entry burden is real. Every NIBIN entry takes time, and large agencies recover thousands of guns a year. Backlogs build fast. One major city entered around 20,000 guns into the tracing system in a single year, and roughly half were from prior years. You can be participating and still be months behind on your own investigations because it took too long to enter, validate, and connect.
Agencies can submit to NIBIN and eTrace and still capture only a fraction of the value if the incident context never travels with the evidence.
Key takeaway: Submitting to NIBIN and eTrace is the floor, not the finish line. Audit your workflow for the real bottlenecks including duplicate entry, faxed forms, backlogs, and incident context that never travels with the evidence.
Accelerating evidence to action with modern tech
Crime gun intelligence should not depend on duplicate entry, handwritten forms, or an analyst rebuilding the same picture across four systems. Firearm and incident data should move automatically, with standardized fields, at the moment of entry. Trace results and known-possessor information should return directly to the case, with the who, what, when, and where already attached.
Mark43 built the Mark43 Crime Gun Interfaces in partnership with the Louisville Metro Police Department to do exactly that. The interfaces connect Mark43 RMS to ATF’s NESS and eTrace DIRECT, so firearm and incident data can be shared automatically. Early adopters have seen cycle time drop by 95 percent and hundreds of workdays returned for actual investigative work.
Adam: The interfaces remove the burden of manual submission, but the larger point applies to every agency: crime gun intelligence only works when it moves quickly and reaches the people who can act on it. We have both stood in front of chiefs and analysts who had this intelligence sitting in their own data and did not know it. The evidence was already collected. The connections were already there. What was missing was speed, visibility, and a way to act before the trail went cold.
The case for timely crime gun data is simple: get it fast, get it connected, and give investigators the intelligence they need while it can still change the outcome.
Key takeaway: The fix is automation, not more manual effort. Data should flow from your RMS to ATF systems automatically, with results returning to the case file. If you are not yet connected to eTrace or NESS, start there and then reach out to Mark43 to learn more about the interfaces.
To learn more about Mark43 Crime Gun Interfaces or speak to an expert, get in touch today.
Alex Lynch and Adam Brewer are former law enforcement professionals now working at Mark43. Alex was the NYPD’s first crime analyst assigned to an ATF task force and later worked with the ATF’s NIBIN Enforcement Support System (NESS), training thousands on crime gun intelligence. He is now a Customer Experience Manager at Mark43. Adam Brewer was a patrol officer and detective with the Colorado Springs Police Department, permanently assigned as a Task Force Officer to the ATF, where he investigated and helped prosecute gun crime. He is now a Services and Partner Enablement Lead at Mark43.