EvidenceIQ
Ever since the day in 1966 when Charles Whitman climbed to the top of the Tower at University of Texas with the determination to kill, gun violence has become more and more among those ills most harmful to society.
Hardly a day goes by that we don’t hear about another victim of gun violence.
Todd Hodnett
Shawn Smith
In 2021, a record number were killed by gun violence — more than 48,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control, and those wounded equal twice that many. Eight-in-10 U.S. murders in 2021 involved a firearm.
That number reflected a 23% increase since 2019.
Beyond all the human treasure lost, it’s an expensive problem financially, too, accounting for a massive negative impact in the tens of billions of dollars. A Harvard study put the cost at more than half a billion dollars if you also consider lost wages and productivity to business.
Two Fort Worth businessmen, Todd Hodnett and Shawn Smith, have brought to the marketplace one remedy that they say will reduce gun violence by more 50% in 10 years.
It is technology their company EvidenceIQ designed over the course of several years of research and development.
Ballistics IQ is a portable scanning device that captures and compares fired cartridge cases collected at crime scenes to provide real-time forensic-based intelligence.
It would stand to reason that profit motive and market forces would ultimately be a player mitigating the scourge of gun violence, but reducing gun crime, Hodnett says of the company, “really is something that's near and dear to our hearts.”
“I don't want to get political about this, but anytime there's a huge incident both sides of the aisle stand up to put forth what they think's gonna solve it,” Hodnett says. “Everybody just digs their heels in.
“Well, we came up with a solution that it doesn't matter which side of the aisle you're on. Ballistics IQ absolutely demonstrates a net positive effect on reducing gun violence because it focuses on guns that have already been involved in crimes and, most importantly, trying to get those off the street. There are no Second Amendment implications when it comes to solving gun-related cases and removing guns that have been involved in one or more gun violence crimes.”
EvidenceIQ
Ballistics IQ analyzes fired cartridge casings ejected from a semiautomatic handgun or rifle at a crime scene. Ballistics IQ is looking for two things: marks left from the firing pin and marks left from the ejector that pulls the fired cartridge casing out of the barrel and throws it to the ground.
“Those two markings are like a fingerprint to that specific gun,” Hodnett says.
In a matter of minutes, law enforcement knows how many unique guns were used at that crime scene.
That is invaluable information to detectives, who need as much real-time intelligence as they can get before conducting interviews with suspects with plenty of reason to mislead.
It’s also information that could take days to process at a typical crime lab, which likely has hundreds of casings to examine.
The ATF developed similar technology about 25 years ago. Ballistics IQ is designed to work in concert with the ATF’s NIBIN, whose testing goes into a national database.
Ballistics IQ, about a foot tall or so, was specifically designed to work “at the edge,” or at the crime scene, to determine the best fired cartridge casing to send to NIBIN.
Simply because of logistics, it could take hours for NIBIN to deliver information depending upon the backlog of fired cartridge casings in the NIBIN lab. So, instead of sending 10 cartridge casings from the same gun to NIBIN, agencies can send the best one they find through Ballistics IQ.
Both technologies have a database. Ballistics IQ’s is local, and NIBIN’s covers the entire country.
Law enforcement departments across the country are using the technology through annual license agreements with EvidenceIQ. Among those are the cities of Denton and Plano. Denton, which has had the technology for two years, uses Ballistics IQ and NIBIN, specifically for its national database.
On the backside of the Ballistics IQ is a group of trained examiners — the Virtual Correlation Center — who analyze the data, looking for correlations to other crime scenes.
Plano handles casings analysis for a number of other agencies across North Texas, says Deion Christophe, a firearms examiner with the city. So, those cases are going through Ballistics IQ, too.
“We were able to tie crimes together pretty quickly,” Christophe says. “We'd send them off for submission and usually within an hour, we'll get notification that our case has been linked to another case or potential case.”
Erin Gonzales of the city of Denton says the department can also test fire guns that have been confiscated or found and enter those shells into the Ballistics IQ database to cross-check.
One good example of the technology’s capacity occurred in January 2021. The crime scene unit from Gwinnett County, Georgia, was called to an apartment complex, the scene of the murder of an employee of a Pest Control company. He had been shot in the head. One fired cartridge was collected.
Later in the day, police pulled over a vehicle and found a pistol inside during a search.
The firearm was test fired, and all fired cartridges were scanned into Ballistics IQ and submitted for testing by EvidenceIQ Virtual Correlation Center. Within 30 minutes the examiner was able associate the test-fired cartridge cases from the pistol found in the car with the fired cartridge case collected from the scene. The report, in conjunction with other evidence, secured an arrest warrant for a suspect.
Hodnett and Smith were partners in VAaaS International Holdings, Inc. One of its first products was license plate recognition. VaaS had two lines of business, one on the commercial side for vehicle repossession and another on law enforcement side.
VAaaS also developed a facial recognition product.
Hodnett and Smith sold the company’s properties, including its R&D on Ballistics IQ, to Motorola Solutions in 2019.
The two led a group in buying that technology back after COVID. They are the major stakeholders in EvidenceIQ.
Said Hodnett: “It's an initiative that I don't see how anybody could object to, and what we're trying to do is use technology, and not just ours, we want to combine with other technologies out there that help solve crimes and gun crimes specifically.”