Sabadell “Catalonia is not a country of firearms related to crime. But, year after year, the incidents are increasing”, says the head of the General Criminal Investigation Department of the Mossos d’Esquadra, Commissioner Ramon Chacón. Thirteen firearm homicides were committed in 2023, four more than the average of recent years. Also last year there were eight critical incidents (a person entrenching himself in a home with a firearm and taking hostages), while in 2022 there were two. And practically only one element explains the increase: “Marijuana is the turning point”, says Chacón.
Of the thirteen homicides involving firearms, only two were not linked to organized crime or drug trafficking. The Mossos have records of 87 narco-assaults linked to marijuana trafficking in 2023, and in half firearms were used or displayed. “It’s an issue that worries us, and that’s why we’re making this push”, concludes Chacón. And that push is coming in the form of new technologies for scientific policing.
“It is an investment of more than a million euros to place us at the forefront of European police forces”, explains the chief commissioner of the Mossos, Eduard Sallent. Suddenly, the auditorium of the central complex of the Mossos, from where Sallent, Chacón and also the head of the scientific police, Superintendent Xavier Sellart, intervened this Tuesday, was left in the dark. A video has started on a giant screen. A man dressed in black entered the same Catalan police complex, went up to an upper room and took out a rifle. He then placed the gun through a window and pointed it at the auditorium, where an officer was taking part. And he shot. The sniper failed, but the Mossos had to start an investigation.
trajectories
To do this, LIDAR came into play, a 3D scanner that captures the scene of the crime and recreates it on a computer. Thus, you can see perfectly through which point of the window the bullet entered and also the exact area where it hit. By connecting these two points, the device creates a kind of cone that traces the most logical trajectory of the bullet until it leads to the room from where it was fired.
If the Mossos had found a person suspected of being the sniper, they would have taken samples (mostly from the hand) and analyzed them with a new tool: the electron microscope SEM. This technology makes it possible to know, basically, if that person has just shot. With this microscope, which is much more precise and is updated to new types of ammunition, the Catalan police arrested two suspects of having participated in a shooting this year, which both denied. And another tool that the scientific police would have used is the EVOFINDER, acquired a few months ago. It is a high-precision scanner that describes the “match probabilities” between bullets. In other words, it tells if two bullets have been fired by the same gun. The Mossos recently discovered that a homicide this year was committed with a gun that was already fired in 2022 in a drug bust.
Distances
If the sniper’s bullet had hit a person, two new tools would have to come into play. First, the high-speed camera, which can capture up to a million images per second and this allows the impact of a bullet to be perfectly recorded. In the test room, the surface is a gelatin with layers inside that simulate bones. They test with various calibers and when the hole closely resembles the victim’s actual wound it means that the police have found the caliber.
It also serves to mark the distance of the impact and this data is also given by a new tool, the iForenLIBS. In this case, the machine scans all the chemical elements left around the bullet hole on the victim’s clothing. If the concentration is very high, it means that it was shot at close range. This made it possible to disprove a man who claimed that he shot his wife from a distance while she was aiming in the garden. He actually shot him at less than a meter.
2024-03-26 19:10:37
#Mossos #preparing #increase #crimes #firearms
