Northern Ohio Violent Crime Consortium

By Jim Irvine

The city of Cleveland has been award a 5.9 Million Dollar Federal grant that will be used in a multi-city effort to reduce violent and gun related crime. A major aspect of the effort will be a mobile National Integrated Ballistics Information Network (NIBIN) linking all confiscated guns in the target area and related crimes across multiple jurisdictions and use BATF trace data to help identify illicit sources of firearms.

The police departments of Akron, Canton, Cleveland, Elyria, Lorain, Mansfield, Toledo and Youngstown, will be supported by Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann and the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Northern District of Ohio.

It is hardly news that the City of Cleveland has experienced an increase in violent crime in recent years. Mayor Jackson has seemed more focused on harassing law-abiding gun owners and his own police officers than solving the cities crime problems. It’s refreshing to see that when someone else is paying the bill, he is willing to work at a project that has some potential to help.

The mobile NIBIN unit will be used to track every gun confiscated in the participating cities. It will also include many guns in police inventory. This has the potential to help solve older crimes such as where a gun used in a Cleveland crime, and is now sitting in a evidence locker in Toledo.

Trace data collected by the BATF will be used to track the movement of guns. This is further proof that Mayor Bloomberg is lying about the inability of law enforcement to use this data to solve crimes. He has ulterior motives that have nothing to do with crime or criminals – he wants your guns, and he wants to sue you for the acts of criminals.

The trace data can provide useful information by highlighting a certain straw purchaser that is buying guns for gangs. This will lead to the arrest, prosecution, and conviction of a felon involved in violent crime. That is the intended use of trace data.

Trace data will not be used for identifying an innocent victim whose guns have been stolen by criminals and later used in crime. That is the information Bloomberg is after so he can sue the crime victims for the damage criminals have done. If successful, that strategy would be devastating to gun owners who are less able to spend money defending baseless lawsuits than the firearms industry.

The project will run till September 30, 2008.

Cleveland has seen large increased in crime since a nearly 20% reduction of police officers in 2004. Without police to arrest criminals, the crucial arrest, prosecution, convictions, and long prison sentence of criminals never gets started. The Cleveland police department no longer has a DARE unit, a strike task force or a gang unit.

Related information: Joint Ohio Attorney General and City of Cleveland Press Release and further details about the grant.