Fiscal Year 2013-2015 Special Budget Meeting

Experience in other jurisdictions has shown that an individual weapon may be used in multiple shootings, either by the same shooter or by people who are sharing a weapon. Ballistic analysis can establish links between shootings and provide maps of shooting patterns that chart how a firearm has been used across a geographic area and across a period of time. It may be the case that a gun used in a shooting was also used in a homicide. As the Department moves forward with its Ceasefire program to try to reduce violence, and especially gun violence, an analysis of links between firearms and crimes and firearms and gangs would be extremely useful in identifying targets for the Ceasefire effort and in directing and coordinating enforcement actions related to Ceasefire. For all these reasons, the Bratton Group team recommends a more comprehensive effort to analyze shell casings found at shooting scenes and to connect them to other casings found at other crime scenes. The actively used firearms in Oakland - the ones being used in multiple shootings - should be well documented, and firearms and shells recovered by the police should be compared to database of firearms and shell casings linked to other crimes. Once again, an increase in staffing at Criminalistics for this specific purpose is recommended. Crime scene technicians in Oakland work without direct supervision and therefore with little systematic organization. They are nominally supervised by a coordinator, a police officer who is also a full-time evidence technician, but the primary function of the coordinator is to organize and oversee the work schedule, not to prioritize or evaluate the quality of the work. The evidence technicans are supervised on a daily basis by patrol shift sergeants, who have little knowledge of their work. After reporting for work to a patrol sergeant at a line-up, evidence techs respond to radio calls almost at will, with no one actively prioritizing calls. There are no run numbers assigned to the calls, and it is not possible to determine with exactitude how many scenes have been processed by each technician each year. As the Bratton Group team understands the situation, the only way to determine if a scene has been processed is by whether or not a check box on the incident report has been checked. The Bratton Group, LLC 10