It’s been nearly two months since police found three men shot to death in a Live Oak home. Since then, four others have lost their lives to gun violence in Savannah.
With nearly 100 shootings since Jan. 1 and almost 200 last year, Savannah-Chatham police say they’re hoping a new initiative that involves state-of-the-art investigative technology and support from federal agents and prosecutors can stem some of the bleeding.
Their focus: guns and the people who use them illegally.
“We’re doing everything we can to shut down violent crime, gun violence and people with guns who are not supposed to have guns,” said Savannah-Chatham Police Maj. Richard Zapal. “It’s the people who are going to hurt you who are the ones we want to get off the street.”
Based on FBI crime data, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives considers Savannah-Chatham County the 28th most violent U.S. city in the 100,000-250,000 population range.
“We want to get the dealers off the street, too,” Zapal said, “but it’s more important to get people who are going to hurt someone else.”
That’s where ballistics intelligence program NIBIN, gunfire-tracking system ShotSpotter and federal charges come in. But, Zapal stressed, the new, high-tech systems police are using are just tools in the effort to fight crime. Ultimately, it’s good police work that counts.
Ballistics tracking
Now evidence pickup has more bite thanks to a bit of technology the ATF brought to town late last year.
The National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, or NIBIN, essentially lets investigators fast track shell casing information for comparison across a national firearms forensics network.
“It helps departments and investigators link shooting incidents and identify leads that help with multiple shooting scenes and active shooters that are out there committing multiple shootings,” said Ray Brown, the assistant special agent in charge of the ATF’s Atlanta Field Division, which oversees the agency’s Savannah office.
Zapal compared NIBIN to the national Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, except it’s for guns.
The major said it used to take metro police as long as a year to get matches on bullets and shell casings.
“Now you can have it in 10 minutes,” he said. “We put it in the machine as quickly as we possibly can, and we have matched bullets between scenes and from the shell casings to guns.”
In addition to sending forensics officers to locations where shots were fired, metro police also often send a K-9 specially trained to sniff out shell casings and bullets. When he’s not available, the sheriff’s office often lends a hand and sends one of its gun-tracking dogs.
Brown says the system can help solve crimes in other jurisdictions, even ones in other states, if a match shows up for an unsolved case.
He said the combination of NIBIN and ShotSpotter lets investigators identify shell casings faster, which can lead to quicker answers.
“It’s amazing when the technology really helps put you in the right direction and you’re able to help somebody else further their investigation or are able to link a fact pattern or string together multiple crime scenes that you didn’t know about before,” Brown said.
Tracking gunshots
Late last year, the city of Savannah began installing the ShotSpotter system around town. The gunfire-detection technology picks up when a shot is fired, records it and immediately notifies police.
Metro police officers patrolling the city’s streets can access the alerts on their in-car computers and play the shots back and see the location on a map. That’s more accurate than the traditional method of either waiting for a 911 call or an officer hearing shots and, as Zapal put it, “riding through the area blind.”
The city purchased the ShotSpotter system for $175,000 and must pay $135,000 annually to keep it running. Detectors are installed throughout Savannah, and their appearance is kept secret.
As of Wednesday, the system has recorded 528 gunshots in Savannah, said Julian Miller, metro police spokesman.
The Savannah College of Art and Design, meanwhile, purchased a ShotSpotter system for its own buildings, becoming the first university in the country to do so for both the interior and exterior of its buildings.
With SCAD buildings scattered throughout downtown and parts of midtown and the college sharing information with metro police, the contribution, officers say, is significant in helping them track gun violence. While the college would not disclose how much it paid for the system, staff said the university’s network covers about two square miles.
In a December interview, SCAD director of security John Buckovich pulled up a ShotSpotter demo from Oakland, Calif., that showed the technology tracking a drive-by shooting in which shots were being fired in a moving pattern at 35 mph. That, he said, can show officers where a car is headed and help them intercept it.
While SCAD bought its ShotSpotter technology and interior gunshot-tracking sensors — called SecureCampus — as a public safety enhancement for students, Buckovich said the layout of the university’s campus lends itself to cooperation with local police.
“We’re getting tips of suspicious people around our buildings, and we’re getting tips of suspicious people around the community, which is important, too, because our campus is so spread out and intertwined in the city,” he said. “... If it’s something that requires police assistance, we call the PD. If it’s something that doesn’t involve our campus, we’ll also call the PD.”
Buckovich said the ShotSpotter technology is important to the college because it increases his staff’s “situational awareness” of what’s happening nearby.
Zapal said ShotSpotter is just a tool, but it works well and gets officers to shooting or shots-fired scenes more quickly.
Importantly, he said, it can tell the difference between a gunshot and something that sounds like a gunshot. It’s not uncommon for people to call 911 about fireworks, for example, and ShotSpotter can be used to verify. In his office recently, the major pulled up examples of recent incidents in Savannah in which the system tagged a possible gunshot — something that sounded like it may have been construction related but was also able to isolate a gunshot from heavy traffic noise.
“It differentiates,” Zapal said. “It’s that smart.”
And right on the money.
In fact, during a ceremony for fallen officers ahead of Memorial Day, Zapal thought to check his phone seconds after the department’s honor guard fired a 21-gun salute in front of police headquarters. ShotSpotter had instantly picked up the noise and alerted him to its origin.
The system, as of Wednesday, has picked up 2,106 detections that were not real gunshots. Either way, Miller said, when police are alerted to something that might be a gunshot, they investigate.
Accuracy and evidence collection
The accuracy has helped police solve crimes faster, Zapal said.
On Nov. 20, a woman called 911, reporting her 6-year-old daughter had been shot while they were walking to East Broad K-8 for school.
Her story didn’t match a ShotSpotter alert, though, and police found the actual shooting scene in the woman’s apartment, blocks away. The woman and her boyfriend were both charged with crimes related to the incident, which began as a domestic dispute, and the child was treated at a hospital.
Buckovich pointed out how the ShotSpotter technology also makes it easier for police to see where shootings have occurred recently.
“That’s good for resource deployment,” he said. “When you look at staffing and the best place to put people ... the city would be able to map out where their high densities of gunshots were.”
There’s another way the technology helps police: People don’t always call 911 when they hear gunfire.
“In high-crime areas, there are a lot of crimes that go undetected because the people who live in those areas who have been victimized might not routinely report stuff, unfortunately, and it goes undetected by law enforcement,” Brown said. “... The technology helps with the notification, and, sometimes, in those responses where evidence is collected, that helps tell the stories in crimes and links different crimes together, giving investigators and agents additional leads.”
Zapal said that’s a big piece of the effort. Every time the department gets an alert from ShotSpotter, officers are sent to the location. That means police are gathering more evidence than ever before.
“Even if the suspect’s not there anymore, we can pick up the shell casings,” he said.
Hard time
Police aren’t just trying to get people who use guns to commit violence off the streets. They’re trying to put them away for longer periods of time.
Guns being used in crimes in different states or a certain amount of violent or serious drug offenses with firearms in a few years are some of the factors authorities weigh when considering to bring federal charges against offenders.
“We’re looking to prosecute, for lack of better description, the worst of the worst,” said Edward Tarver, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Georgia.
A committee composed of members of Tarver’s office, the district attorney’s office, the ATF and metro police meet monthly to discuss which cases can be prosecuted in federal court.
Chatham County District Attorney Meg Heap said when investigators and prosecutors go after people in gangs, they can hit them with tougher charges if firearms are involved.
“You try to focus on getting them on gun charges and getting them off the streets,” Heap said. “It kind of breaks up the gang and reduces the level of crime.”
When possible, she said, they take cases federal.
“Federally, they do more time,” Heap said.
Additionally, there’s no federal parole. In crowded state prisons in Georgia, people convicted of violent crimes don’t always serve full sentences.
“In some cases, if an individual has committed a serious violent criminal offense, it may be appropriate to find a mechanism that removes that individual from the community for a longer period of time,” Tarver said, adding that such sentences are determined by each case’s facts and a judge’s decisions.
Though Tarver’s office has worked closely with local police, federal agents and the district attorney’s office for years, he said the relationship has recently “strengthened,” and a more formal partnership has been established with the introduction of the ShotSpotter technology.
“I think it’s a step in the right direction,” the U.S. attorney said. “It’s not a system that’s in wide use across the country, so I think Savannah is ahead of the pack in investing resources in the community. We’ve seen some early success... in identifying shell casings and in identifying weapons used in various shootings.”
Heap says the FBI is also involved in tackling the violent crime problem and that the cooperation between multiple agencies is important.
Heap, Zapal and Brown all said they expect the program to have an impact.
“In each area where there is violent crime, it’s not a lot of people that are committing the crime and keeping the rate up,” Brown said. “It’s a smaller group of individuals. And by working together and by using an intelligence-led approach and trying to maximize on the technology that’s available to help identify the individuals who are out there using guns to prey on other people, by working together and trying to use the best resources that are available, it helps us to identify ... the worst of the worst of the people that are out there actively using gun violence.
“By focusing on those individuals and trying to arrest those individuals by any means necessary, it absolutely impacts violent crime in any region or area.”