ATF Crime Gun Intelligence Analysis

Crime Gun Intelligence Centers

CGICs are regional clearinghouses for firearms intelligence and data regarding firearms-related crime. They are often partnered with other intelligence entities such as fusion centers and real time crime centers. Their core mission is to provide timely and accurate intelligence to assist in the identification of shooters and their sources of crime guns. There are 25 ATF CGIC’s located across the country that work in partnership with local law enforcement and intelligence units to assist with investigations and improve their NIBIN process. To effectively meet this mission, CGICs operate under five core concepts:

• Collect
• Analyze
• Refer
• Track
• Support

The CGIC’s top priority is to collect information from NIBIN, firearms tracing, and police investigative reports relating to firearm and violent gun crime events. In addition, it is the CGIC’s responsibility to collect related information that might include local department incident and supplemental reports, cell phone analysis, gunshot detection system alerts, license plate readers, social media exploitation and crime camera images.

Once the raw information is brought together into the CGIC, highly trained and skilled federal, state, and local personnel from intelligence, firearms industry operations, and criminal investigations work together to analyze and layer information to provide actionable leads. It is at this phase that commonalities between shooting events beyond ballistics, or solvability factors, are discovered adding even more value to the lead.