Myrtle Beach police track down multiple leads with technology analyzing bullets

MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. (WMBF) - In just a year the Myrtle Beach Police Department’s National Integrated Ballistic Information Network has helped officers track down around 250 leads in cases by analyzing bullet shell casings.

The police department enters a shell casing to NIBIN, and the program tells it what kind of gun the casing came from.

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Then it can search other agencies in South Carolina and around the country to see who owns the gun and if it’s been used in other crimes.

Firearms technician Enrico Borrelli said the program can help blow cases wide open.

“They can take us from a case that’s a basic traffic stop where a gun’s gotten out of the car and link to a homicide in another jurisdiction or even our jurisdiction,” said Borrelli.

He said the new technology is helping them solve cases so much faster now and even helping other agencies do the same because they use to have to do all that work by hand.

“Typically we would go through SLED for the bulk of it and they have the entire state’s cases to work with. It takes us to give them an extra hand so we can get guns processed quicker here. We also help other agencies whether it’s somewhere in South Carolina or even up to New Jersey we’ve had cases give us leads to.” Said Borrelli.

Myrtle Beach City Council will vote to renew the Project Safe Neighborhood Grant paying for the program at its meeting on Tuesday at 10 a.m.

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