Camden County Police Acquire New Ballistics Scanning Technology To Fight Crime
By David Madden
CAMDEN, N.J. (CBS) -- Police in Camden, NJ have a new tool to fight crime. It's a gift from the feds, and it helps keep track of guns used for criminal purposes.
It's called NIBIN -- National Integrated Ballistic Information Network -- (pronounced "nye-bin"), and it's a computer system that allows for shell casings to be scanned and submitted to various databases for comparison.
Former New Jersey state police ballistics expert Sal DiPaola came out of retirement to join the Camden County police force a few weeks ago to run the NIBIN program.
He says that when he submits results to the central point in Maryland, the system reports back when it finds a match.
"It's going to search automatically against Philadelphia, which includes Chester and Wilmington, and it's going to search the entire state of New Jersey," he notes.
Weapons now can be linked to a series of crimes in a matter of hours, instead of days.
Camden County owns the only such system in South Jersey, and county police chief Scott Thomson expects to share the technology with other departments.
