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New Equipment Will Give Police a Better Shot at Solving Crimes : In-House Tests of Bullets Found at Crime Scenes Can Aid Investigations

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SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

Police Chief Paul M. Walters recalls the time it took a year for a gun seized by his department to be tested by the Orange County Sheriff’s Department crime lab.

Detectives were not sure the gun had been used in a crime, and so did not give it the high priority needed to sail through the county crime lab in as quick as a day. When tests finally came through, police linked the gun to a suspect already charged with two killings.

Frustrated with such backlogs, Santa Ana is starting its own firearms testing lab to more quickly process weapons recovered in the city--the site of more than half of Orange County’s homicides last year.

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Delays in processing crime scene evidence have been a long-standing concern, but authorities say the problem has been more acute since Orange County’s bankruptcy.

Santa Ana becomes the second local city, in addition to Huntington Beach, to have its own firearms testing lab, a move police officials say will help them investigate and solve crimes more quickly.

“The longer it takes” to test a gun, said Walters, “the longer it takes to put a case together.”

This week, the Santa Ana City Council made the final major purchase--two microscopes costing $63,500--to get the lab running by year’s end.

Santa Ana police confiscate approximately 1,000 guns a year, and authorities say about 600 are believed to be linked to crimes.

Investigators flag about 200 weapons--those confiscated through search warrants or with other evidence linking them to crimes--as high priority and send the guns to the sheriff’s crime lab, said Santa Ana Police Capt. Dan McCoy, who heads the city’s crime lab.

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The other firearms, however, sometimes sit for a year before testing; even some priority cases may not be tested for a month, according to Santa Ana police officials.

State law requires the Sheriff’s Department crime lab to provide free firearms and ballistics testing for Santa Ana and other local law enforcement agencies. But in the wake of the county’s bankruptcy, the Sheriff’s Department cut $400,000 from the crime lab’s annual budget, which is now $8.1 million.

“The bankruptcy has hurt us,” said Sheriff’s Lt. Ron Wilkerson, “and we do have several hundred [ballistics] cases that have not been processed.”

With its own firearms testing capability, Santa Ana police could process 200 weapons each year and will have more flexibility in determining when to examine guns, bullets and shell casings. Santa Ana police will continue to send weapons to the Sheriff’s Department on a case-by-case basis, McCoy said.

In 1995, 72 of the county’s 125 homicides occurred within Santa Ana city limits. Police say the in-house gun testing will become part of the department’s efforts, including stepped-up enforcement and intervention, to reduce those numbers. McCoy said Santa Ana has had 14 homicides so far this year, compared with 33 at the same time last year.

Orange County Assistant Dist. Atty. John Conley, who heads the office’s major crimes division, said he could not recall a case that was delayed for lack of firearms evidence. But he said prompt identification “allows police to make an arrest and take a bad person off the streets more promptly.”

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The city is spending $110,000 to set up the more sophisticated firearms testing program, including hiring a firearms examiner expected to report to work later this year.

New equipment includes a bullet recovery tank, which allows the examiner to match a bullet that has been test-fired to a particular gun. When police officers find a bullet at a crime scene and confiscate a weapon, they can fire the weapon into the tank without damaging the test bullet as it softly drops to the tank’s bottom.

Striations, or grooves, left on the bullet by the gun barrel are as distinctive as fingerprints and can link bullets to particular guns. The firearms examiner can then use the microscopes to examine the bullets. One of the microscopes has a specialized function that allows it to render objects in 3-D.

Recovery tanks can retail for about $40,000, but Santa Ana officials bought theirs for $2,500 from the Beverly Hills Police Department.

“In the scheme of things, [a testing lab] is very cost effective,” McCoy said.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Going Ballistic

A recovery tank allows investigators to safely examine a gun’s ballistics by comparing the markings of bullets fired in the water-filled container with those found at a crime scene. How the process works:

1. Gun barrel is fit into cylinder, whirlpool is started and gun is fired.

2. Whirlpool slows speed of bullet, causing it to tumble to tank floor.

3. Lid is lifted from tank; small net is used to retrieve bullet.

4. Ballistic markings examined under microscope.

Source: Santa Ana Police Department; Orange County Sheriff’s Department

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