The Clermont County Sheriff's office will have new tools to link guns with shootings. The federal Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Wednesday brought its crime gun intelligence mobile command center to the county.
The center will stay in Clermont County for several months and will be operated by sheriff's deputies.
The four-room wheeled facility assists in crime scene investigations, including DNA swabbing, fingerprint analysis of firearms and testing of shell casings. Marks on the casings can then be analyzed via computers onboard and matched with the ATF's database to find out if the weapon that fired them has been used in other crimes.
Clermont County Sheriffs' Deputy Joe Ruchti says he hopes to test up to 100 casings a month at the facility from firearms used or suspected of use in crime.
One soundproofed room contains test-fire equipment allowing deputies to obtain spent shell casings from a firearm. Other rooms contain powerful imaging equipment called Brass Trax and computer equipment needed for shell casing analysis.
"The better picture of the crime data and the instruments used in that crime, the sooner you solve the crime and the more effective the prosecution is going to be," he said.
The Clermont County Sheriffs Department learned the mobile unit was available recently and successfully applied to have it brought to the region.
Ruchti says the facility will be available to help investigate gun crimes across much of southeastern Ohio. Clermont County doesn't currently have a similar setup, so it will make solving shootings much quicker there, he said.
"We would kind of wait until there was a large enough amount of crime scene or test-fire casings to go to another site," he said of the department's previous process for testing shell casings from crime scenes. "With it in-house, we can do 10 the morning-of. We don't have to wait to justify going to a partner site that is an hour away, two hours away."
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