I can still picture Former Director Tom Brandon working the hallway.
Fifteen minutes with the SACs, laying out a vision big enough to make you sit up straighter. Down the hall, same building, same man, talking to agents, analysts, and local detectives about ATF being “no greater partner”, and about the investigator still doing the work regardless of the challenge. Later that day, a keynote in front of chiefs, and now it’s confidence, results they can defend in their own budget hearings.
Same person. Three languages. Never once did it feel like an act.
That’s the instinct sitting at the front of the Crime Gun Intelligence Architecture. Element one isn’t the database. It isn’t the ballistic network. It’s the champion, the one who can walk out of the Detective Bureau, out of the lab, into the chief’s office, and make the same mission land in every room.
That instinct is also what moved NIBIN out of the forensic lane. For years it lived with the forensic techs, useful, interesting, contained. Director Brandon made the call a lot of people didn’t fully get at the time: NIBIN wasn’t just a lab tool anymore. It was operational. It could stop the next shooting, if somebody had the nerve to say so and build around it.
Rank helps. It opens doors passion alone can’t. But rank without the code-switching skill just gets you a title on a program that never moves. The champion needs both: enough position to make cooperation the easy choice, and enough fluency to keep every stakeholder speaking the same language.
That’s the work our new book digs into. Stop Chasing Shooters lays out the 13 elements that turn crime gun intelligence from equipment sitting in a corner into a program that actually stops the next shooting, starting with the one nobody puts in the budget line: the champion.
Who’s your agency’s CGI champion? Maybe it’s you. Maybe it’s someone you need to start backing.
If you can’t name that person, you don’t have a program. You have equipment.
Stop Chasing Shooters: The Crime Gun Intelligence Architecture is available now on Amazon.
Thank you, Tom Brandon for your visionary leadership while at the helm of ATF! As a champion for state and local collaboration and the integration of all the crime fighting tools in the ATF Toolbox you were laser focused on protecting the public from the most violent of crimes involving firearms, explosives and Arson.
In over 40 yrs of govt service (military & LE) I’ve met & worked with many good leaders who abided by Kouzes & Poster’s Five Exemplary Leadership Practices (Model the Way, Inspire a Shared Vision, Challenge the Process, Enable Others to Act, & Encourage the Heart), in whole or in part. Tom embodied all 5 all the time. Not because it was a good formula but because that’s who he is.