Every jurisdiction plagued by gun violence eventually runs into the same wall.
You can have lead information that’s technically perfect and still lose, because it arrived too late to matter. Perfect information that shows up after the next shooting isn’t intelligence. It’s a history lesson.
Here’s the math, at least in New Jersey. A Rutgers University analysis of NIBIN data found that once a gun turns up in multiple crimes, there’s a 60% chance it fires again within 90 days. Read that twice. The clock isn’t measured in case files. It’s measured in more shootings and more lives impacted.
If your ballistic turnaround runs longer than 24 to 48 hours, you’re not preventing the next crime. You’re documenting the next victim.
What New Jersey got wrong first
We believed centralization meant efficiency. Consolidate the lab, streamline the process, done. That’s how our Tech Plex was built, and it backfired. A local officer with a recovered gun or a single 9mm casing had to drive over 50 miles just to drop it off. So guns sat in evidence lockers for months. Not because the science was slow. Because the logistics were broken.
There’s a second friction point underneath that one.
Trial-ready evidence and investigative-ready leads don’t move at the same speed. Trial-ready is slow and precise, built for a courtroom years away. Investigative-ready is fast, built for the street, useful within 24 to 48 hours or not useful at all. A ballistic lab that only optimizes for courtroom precision will lose the investigative mission every time.
The case that should haunt every commander
In 2010, a police officer in Northern New Jersey was ambushed on his way to work and shot six times.
Hundreds of detectives worked it. Thousands of hours. A command post running around the clock, hunting a shooter who felt like a ghost.
He wasn’t a ghost. He was 15 miles away, already identified on an unrelated charge, his gun sitting on a shelf the whole time. The technology existed to make that connection in hours. The architecture around the technology didn’t exist, so it took over a month.
That’s not a technology failure. That’s an architecture failure. It’s the entire argument of our book, Stop Chasing Shooters, told in one true story.
How it was fixed
In 2013, New Jersey’s average ballistic turnaround was 10 months. Ten months, while the Rutgers data was screaming that the odds of that gun firing again in 90 days is high.
The New Jersey State Police built the RAIN Protocol to close that gap. They stopped forcing officers to drive 50 miles to submit evidence. They opened the pipeline. They mandated a 24-to-48-hour submission window, no exceptions.
The result: New Jersey now collects 40 percent more NIBIN evidence than the national average. Not because they bought better machines. Because they stopped burying good machines under bad architecture.
What this asks of leadership
The shift every commander has to make is moving from chasing shooters to disrupting the cycle before the next trigger pull. Three things, and none of them are optional:
· Your data has to move across jurisdictional lines within a national network, or it’s sitting in a file cabinet with a badge number on it.
· You have to decide, deliberately, where trial-ready precision gives way to investigative-ready speed. That balance doesn’t happen by accident.
· And you have to fix the physical, unglamorous logistics of how ballistic evidence gets from a crime scene to a lab technician’s bench.
If your ballistic lab, or the one you depend on, is built to store history instead of drive disruption, you’re not simply behind. You’re failing the next person who’s about to become a victim, right now, while the gun that will do it sits on a shelf somewhere waiting to be processed.
So ask yourself plainly: is your agency’s architecture built to stop the next shooting, or is it built to store ballistic evidence?
That question is why we wrote Stop Chasing Shooters. The book is available today on Amazon.
Get ready to build the architecture that stops the next shooting.
The Rutgers finding is the part that should stop every commander. Once a gun is linked to multiple shootings, the window is measured in days, which makes speed a matter of prevention rather than convenience.
Closing that gap is the work I am committed to now, in firearms violence and in every other crime of violence where the connection exists somewhere and no one surfaces it in time. Ray, you make the case for why architecture determines whether that is even possible. The science is not what is slow. The pipeline is.
I have not picked up Stop Chasing Shooters yet, but this piece is a strong invitation to do exactly that. Ray, thank you for the insight.
If you build it - leads will come!