National Ballistic Analysis System reveals correlation of crimes that had no witnesses in Roraima

The PCRR (Civil Police of Roraima) is witnessing significant advances in criminal investigation, thanks to the implementation of the IBIS (Integrated Ballistic Comparison System in Roraima) which took place from July 2023. During an expert analysis carried out by the ICPDA team of experts ( Instituto de Criminalística Perito Dimas Almeida), for the first time it was possible to correlate two homicide crimes, which occurred at different times, using the same weapon.

The director of the Criminalistics Institute, Sttefani Ribeiro, highlighted the details behind this new crime-fighting tool.

According to him, since the installation of the National Ballistic Analysis System, a national program of the MJSP (Ministry of Justice and Public Security), of which the state of Roraima is part through the Secretariat of Public Security and the Civil Police, which began in July, with training with the Canadian team, until its completion in mid-October 2023, criminal experts began to feed data on projectiles, cases and cartridges collected from crime scenes.

“All those projectiles, cases, cartridges collected from the crime scene by the criminal expert are taken to our Custody Center and, after analyzed, are sent to Forensic Ballistics. Forensic Ballistics feeds the National Ballistic Analysis System with these projectiles, which are part of a large database. And after feeding, it starts to make automatic crossings. Today we have approximately 140 projectiles and more or less 30 cases that are inside this local bank”, he highlighted.

The big news, according to Sttefani Ribeiro, is that for the first time it was possible to correlate two homicide crimes, which occurred at different times, which in principle had no connection with each other, using the same weapon.

“Through an automatic analysis, the system was able to index and correlate, for the first time in the State of Roraima, two crimes against the person, in which two people died, which were committed one month after the other, with the same weapon. This is the great news that we achieved today, correlating the same weapon used in several criminal scenarios”, highlighted the director of ICPDA.

From a technical-expert point of view, the director noted that it attracted a lot of attention, both from management and from ballistics experts, who expect a positive result over time from feeding 1,500 to 2,000 insertions of projectiles and/or cases.

“We expected some results to start appearing, obviously. It then caught attention that from less than 200 projectiles and cases inserted into the system, it has already brought the first positive result. So, the performance was very good in a short space of time and with a very small database”, he celebrated.

Criminal expert assistant Joel Cordeiro, who works in ballistics forensics, shares his technical perspective on the importance of the system used to capture the image of these ammunition elements.

“In these two cases here, involving two homicides in Boa Vista, we analyzed the cases of these two cases. And the system, through these images that we obtained, is able to match these specific marks on the weapon, which leave individualizing marks, allowing us to identify the weapon by weapon”, he explained.

According to Cordeiro, the expertise revealed the similarity, with on-site verification with the ballistic microcomparator.

“The great importance of this system for the Public Security of Roraima and for our Criminal Expertise is being able to interlink cases that, a priori, had no correlation and no suspects. For example, in one of these cases we had a situation where there was no suspect or witness to the crime. And in another we had. So the system allowed us to automatically locate these patterns that linked these two cases and, thus, we obtained this result. In other words, we linked two cases that a priori had no connection at all”, he detailed.

The crimes

Regarding the results of the examination, the director of the Institute of Criminalistics highlighted that the procedures will be forwarded to the chief delegate of the General Homicide Police Station to support the investigations that are currently underway.

Sandra Lima