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‘Ballistic fingerprint’ program abandoned

Frederick News-Post Editorial Board
Nov 17, 2015
7








Fifteen years after the state of Maryland created a system intended to identify the owners of handguns used in crimes, the program has ended — not with a bang, but with a whimper. The story of this program provides yet another example of the failure of a well-intentioned government initiative that did not perform as anticipated, was poorly managed, and ended up costing taxpayers millions.
In 2000, the Legislature passed a bill requiring that all new handguns sold in Maryland be fired by the manufacturer and the spent shell casing sent to the Maryland State Police. There, the casing was to photographed, barcoded, cataloged and stored. A photographic image of its distinctive “ballistic fingerprint” was entered into the program’s database.
In theory, a shell casing from a handgun used in a crime could be compared with those in the database and, when a match occurred, the buyer of the gun could be identified. According to a recent Baltimore Sun story, however, in reality, “the system Maryland bought created images so imprecise that when an investigator submitted a crime scene casing, the database software would sometimes spit out hundreds of matches. The state sued the manufacturer in 2009 for $1.9 million, settling three years later for $390,000.”
The total cost to taxpayers of the program’s life: about $5 million.
The most troubling part of this story is that this program continued for years after law enforcement and legislators knew that it wasn’t working. While state police continued to collect casings as the law prescribed, in 2007 it discontinued photographing them due to the system’s poor performance in sorting and matching the images.
Again from the Sun story, “By 2004, when Maryland officials calculated an ineffective system had already cost the state $2.4 million, some legislators tried unsuccessfully to repeal the ballistic fingerprinting law. Repeal efforts in 2005 and 2014 also failed.”
Now, a decade and a half in, Attorney General Brian Frosh says, “It’s fair to look at it after 15 years and see how effective it was. I don’t have a problem abandoning it.” Better late than never, because Republican state Sen. Ed Reilly, of Anne Arundel County, says it was Frosh, then a state senator and chairman of the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee, who stood in the way of attempts to repeal the law. Frosh claims earlier efforts to kill the program were not supported by law enforcement officials. It was Sen. Bobby Zirkin, Frosh’s successor as committee chairman, who finally let the bill come up for a vote.
During its entire lifetime, this system was never instrumental in solving a single case. What remains are more than 300,000 shell casings that “fill three cavernous rooms secured by a common combination lock” in an old fallout shelter under the state police’s Pikesville headquarters. The law repealing the program gives state police the authority to sell the cartridges for scrap metal.
This story appears to have something in common with the rollout of the state’s Affordable Care Act website. In each case, the faulty technology that was chosen caused delays, failure, and wasted millions of dollars. Both, in the end, involve bad decisions made by elected officials and program managers.
The basic science of ballistic fingerprinting has merit, but Maryland’s program to collect a sample shell casing from every handgun sold in the state was too ambitious, and the technology it used was flawed. In addition, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives says that most handguns used in crimes are bought nearly 15 years beforehand. In those intervening years, they may have been stolen and resold. That lag time likely also contributed to the system’s poor record of performance.
As Zirkin’s committee was considering the repeal of this law, he says, “If there was any evidence whatsoever — any evidence — that this was helpful in solving crimes, we wouldn’t have touched it. The police came in and said it was useless. No one contradicted that.”
It’s possible that those 300,000 casings could have forensic value sometime in the future, so at this point disposing of them could be yet another mistake. At any rate, how much would they bring being sold for scrap metal? Something a bit short of $5 million, we’d guess.

I just read your email and forwarded it.

NY did the same, doesn't stop the same bunch of idiots from wanting to introduce microstamping.

I remember when they started that schit. What a fugking joke.




Dave

The part that pizzes me off is this is a demonstration of how incompetent and wasteful the government is. Those were my tax dollars.

It leave me to wonder what other stupid schit they're wasting money on.

At least our new Republican Governor isn't going to let in any of the ISIS...... or I mean the Syrian Refugees.

Not to mention they lie to everybody about their capabilities.

Just like when the ATF claimed they could track weapons in Mexico. Really? I'd love to see your Mexican gun tracking database for the interior of Mexico. Stand up at a Police Chief's convention and try to sell that bullschit so you can be laughed off the stage.

And now Lynch tells Congress we can "vet" Syrians. Yeah... sure thing. Walk us through that process. I'd love to see it.



Dave

Yeah, but the libs got the slaw passed and to them, thats all that counts.Like so many other 'feel good' laws they pass, they don't really give a schitt if it works or not. They got it passed.

The most troubling part of this story is that this program continued for years after law enforcement and legislators knew that it wasn’t working.