VOLUSIA COUNTY, Fla. – A groundbreaking technology could get shooters behind bars a lot faster in Volusia County.
The Volusia Sheriff’s Office is the first agency in the United States to implement the new system, which helps investigators in pinpointing the exact location of a shooting and type of gun within minutes.
Cole Bitner, a Volusia crime scene investigator, explained the initial steps.
“Step one would be the scene processing, which would include taking photos of the casings, collecting them, then bringing them back here, triaging them with the ClearCase to find out how many firearms could have been used,” he said.
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The ClearCase technology from LeadsOnline documents the precise location and identifies the caliber and type of firearms used within minutes of scanning. This data is then sent to a national database, which can reveal other locations where the guns have been used, potentially linking them to other cases around Central Florida if the shooter has moved.
“Before we had the NIBIN (National Integrated Ballistic Identification Network) machine, our deputies would respond to a drive-by shooting, and that would be all over the ground. What we would have to do is collect these shell casings and send them to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which serves the entire Central Florida region,” said Chief Deputy Brian Henderson.
Henderson noted that this process sometimes resulted in a year-long backlog to receive data.
“We have a 100% homicide clearance rate. We have an 80% violent crime clearance rate from 2024. If you look across the country, the average clearance rate is about 44%,” said Henderson.
The data from shell casings could also help solve older cases.
“We’ve had that happen where we recover a gun, a felon possession of a firearm, we bring it in, test fire it, and sure enough, that gun was linked to a homicide from five or six years ago,” said Chief Henderson. “It takes us from having no leads at all to having some pretty important leads.”