Maryland lawmakers passed the ballistic-fingerprinting measure in 2000, and it was signed into law by then-Governor Parris N. Glendening (D) as a way for police to use shell casings found at crime scenes to find the gun that had fired them.
In theory, according to Breitbart, a shell casing could then be traced to the gun purchased by the perpetrator of the crime. In order to do this, the measure required gun manufacturers to test-fire every handgun sold in the state and send the shell casing to the Maryland State Police.
The science behind the measure was valid. Scratches etched on the shell casing can be used to match it to the gun that fired the bullet, making it a so-called “fingerprint’ of the gun. Maryland’s system was an expanded version of a successful, but limited version of the federal government’s National Integrated Ballistic Information Network started in the 1990s.
But theory and science had nothing to do with the actual operation and demise of the program. The state has amassed over 300,000 shell casings, all of them stored in three cavernous rooms in an old fallout shelter beneath Maryland State Police headquarters in Pikesville, all the rooms secured by a common combination lock, writes the Baltimore Sun.
Every single shell casing was carefully photographed by a forensic scientist, stamped with its own barcode and sealed in its own envelope, then filed in one of the many boxes that fill the rooms from floor to ceiling. The system cost the state $5 million to set-up and operate over the years.
Over the past 15 years, the database helped in 26 investigations, but with each case, they already knew which gun was in question, state police officials said, according to Fox News. New York also started a database modeled after Maryland’s program, but abandoned it in 2012 when it proved to be ineffective.
The Maryland program was doomed from the start because of bugs in the software. The Baltimore Sun says “the computerized system designed to sort and match the images never worked as envisioned” so in 2007, taking pictures of the casings was halted, even though thousands and thousands of shell casings kept piling up.
John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center spoke with Fox News. “It was clear 10 years ago that this program was not going to work,” he said. “Millions were spent on funding this program, money that could have been better used for actual police and law-enforcement resources.”
Lott pointed out that while the state spent about $60 on cataloging and storing each gun’s shell casing in the database, legally purchased guns were not the ones used by criminals. The software itself was also problematic because of erroneous data entries and other inadequacies, often causing the program to spit out hundreds of “matches” for each casing tested.
The Maryland ballistic fingerprinting law was repealed, being back-dated to October 1, 2015. The rooms full of shell casings, having not helped to solve even one crime, will probably be sold for scrap.
