New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez on Monday announced the creation of a “Crime Gun Intelligence Center” that will help local police departments and sheriffs’ offices across the state analyze data from firearms and spent casings found at crime scenes to identify repeat offenders and gun traffickers.
The initiative has been on Torrez’s to-do list since winning election in 2022, he said, and he credited New Mexico Democratic U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich for securing the federal funding needed to make it happen. In addition to housing a small team of analysts within his New Mexico Department of Justice, Torrez also installed machines that can analyze shell casings, recovered firearms and more within four local law enforcement agencies: the Gallup and Roswell police departments, along with the San Juan and Doña Ana county sheriff’s offices.
The machines compile images of ammunition casings in the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network and let analysts compare them to other entries for potential matches, much like the federal fingerprint database. Torrez’s intention is that the agencies with the machines can become hubs for rural New Mexico, as previously the Albuquerque Police Department had the most advanced NIBIN machine in the state, requiring officers from rural departments to drive several hours to use it.
“It really does enhance public safety, not only in our ability to more quickly solve these problems and understand trafficking patterns, but it also keeps police officers in their communities,” Torrez said Monday. “We shouldn’t have sheriffs’ deputies and police officers from smaller departments being forced to drive into our larger cities to take advantage of this technology.”
The new system starts at the crime scene. Officers gather any physical evidence, like shell casings that are left over when someone fires a gun, and enter detailed photos of them to the NIBIN network. Then, the network examines the photos and evaluates the thousands of other entries for possible matches, which it then sends to Torrez’s Crime Gun Intelligence Center. Analysts there will review anything the system flagged as a potential match, and then send those leads onto local detectives.
Nationally, gunfire has for years been the leading cause of death for children and teenagers. New Mexico’s firearm mortality rate of 25.3 deaths per 100,000 people is nearly double the national rate, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In Albuquerque, this technology has played a key role in solving two of the city’s most high-profile shootings in recent years. Officials with the New Mexico Department of Justice said that analysts’ work of reviewing shell casings helped lead to arrests in the 2022 case of a man accused of targeting and killing Muslims, as well as in the case of failed GOP candidate Solomon Peña, who was convicted in August of orchestrating drive-by shootings at the homes of prominent New Mexico Democrats.
Torrez said he hopes to further expand this system into northeastern New Mexico and wants the New Mexico Department of Public Safety in Santa Fe to sign an agreement that would bring its existing NIBIN machine into the new statewide initiative.
“Every time we take a crime gun off the street, we’re stopping a future shooting,” said NMDOJ Special Investigations Bureau Director Kyle Hartsock. When he began his career in law enforcement 20 years ago, he said, it was common practice to “shrug your shoulders” and discard shell casings once a crime was adjudicated.
But officials on Monday said that holding onto images of those casings has proved an invaluable practice to identify gun trafficking patterns.
Finding spent casings from a gun crime in Farmington and matching them to a previously logged crime in another city, such as Albuquerque, can help police identify trafficking across the state and the nation, law enforcement officials said. Recently, both Republicans and Democrats in the state Legislature called on Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham to put public safety on the upcoming legislative session’s agenda, citing a “crime epidemic” and a new analysis of federal data that found an outsized gun trafficking problem in New Mexico.
“Violent crime does not stop at the city limits,” San Juan County Sheriff Shane Ferrari said.
