ROCKFORD (WREX) — 2020 was a deadly year in Rockford. 36 people were murdered, setting an unfortunate new record for the city.
“The gunfire we’re seeing is exponentially higher,” says Rockford Police Chief Dan O’Shea.
An uptick of bullets flying, with an increase of guns on the street.
“The amount of guns just exploded in 2020,” adds O’Shea.
In 2020, gun violence rose in the city. Officers responded to 679 shots fired calls. Roughly 200 more than what was recorded in both 2018 and 2019. Police also responded to 101 calls where someone was shot in 2020. That total is nearly double to what officers responded to in 2019.
“There’s no way to really describe what happened to the entire country much less Rockford,” says O’Shea. “Loss of jobs, school, fear and paranoia. The anti-government shift, the policing failures.”
Meanwhile, gun sales reached a record high. According to the National Shooting Sports Foundation last year 21 million people bought guns. 8.5 million were people buying one for the first time. The uptick is worrisome for O’Shea, if owners don’t take steps to prevent these guns from winding up in the wrong hands.
“We need everyone to lock them in sturdy vaults that can’t be removed and make sure other people don’t know you have them.”
According to the Rockford Police Department, officers recovered 118 more guns in 2020 compared to 2019. In 2019, 163 guns were taken off the street. In 2020 that number rose to 281.
“Our guns aren’t just being used in Rockford,” says O’Shea. “Our guns are systemically, routinely used in other cities. Particularly Chicago or south suburbs of Chicago, or Milwaukee in particular. We see a lot of the guns moving.”
But how can officers “see” guns moving? Thanks to their NIBIN machine, they can.
“It’s a very high-level, high-technical tool.”
The NIBIN machine, or Natural Integrated Ballistics Information Network is technology that links the casings recovered from a scene to the sole gun that fired them.
“Each casing is like a fingerprint,” explains O’Shea. “When it’s fired from a gun it matches to that gun and that gun only based on the extractor marks when it was fired.”
The machine scans casings and uploads images to the national database. It’s automatically compared to the existing images to see if it has a match.
“So when we recover a crime gun or a firearm from someone who should not have it we test fire it,” says ATF Chicago Division Special Agent in Charge Kristen de Tineo. “We enter that into our ballistics imaging system and any matches so that we can tell it was ever used in a crime.”
Special Agent de Tineo says the leads NIBIN provides detectives enhances the links they can make to solve crimes. She stresses using this technology and working closely with RPD is especially important in a year like 2020 when gun violence spiked.
“Perhaps there’s an incident where there’s no witnesses,” says de Tineo. “No one saw anything and now it’s linked to another incident where there is a witness. Perhaps that witness knows something that can be helpful to the other crime. So we just try to layer all of our intelligence and use every lead that we have to try and affect crime.”
That intelligence includes the boots on the ground. Agents working to prevent illegal activity like straw purchases. A straw purchase is when someone buys a gun for someone who legally can’t. For example, a felon.
Back in 2018 a gun store owner based in Loves Park called ATF agents to report a suspicious transaction. The owner believed a woman had bought a gun with ulterior motives.
“So our agents did go and speak with her and she understood that she could not do that,” says de Tineo. “And she did go and return the firearm to the store.”
But that’s not where the story ends. Two months later, she changed her mind. The woman returned to the same store, bought a gun, and turned it over to a felon.
“Unfortunately he used it to commit a violent act,” says de Tineo.
The felon allegedly used it to shoot someone. Fortunately, they survived.
“In that case the straw purchaser, she has a lot of responsibility for what happens,” says de Tineo.
Which is why de Tineo says the public is one of the most vital resources in helping police bring down violent crime.
“We consider the public one of our partners too. We need their help, we need their assistance, we need them to tell us. When they see things that are not right.”
