Head of the Homicide Bureau Snr Supt Rishi Singh said the detection rate for murder has improved slightly to just under 12 per cent even as the murder count raced past 240 for the first five months of the year.

Speaking with the media at the graduation ceremony for participants completing training in the Integrated Ballistics Identification System (IBIS), Singh said a total of 47 people have been charged for murders, an improvement from last year.

Singh said of the 47 cases solved included cases going back as far as 2006. For incidents which occurred this year, 28 people were charged.

He said the new graduates and the IBIS system, one of the major tools used in the fight against crime, will help speed up analysis of guns and ammunition used in crimes and possibly result in a shorter time for investigations into murders to be completed. The course cost taxpayers $3.7 million.

Noting that an approximated 88 per cent of murders this year was committed by the use of firearms, reporters were told that the IBIS system may be able to assist ballistics technicians in connecting a firearm with not just one murder, but several.

“We know that in the context of what we experience, single offenders are committing multiple crimes, but yet our connections between those are not as swift as we hope they will be, but with investments such as this we are confident that the connections will be made an our detection rates will improve,” Singh said.

National Security Minister Fitzgerald Hinds said a ballistics system in one form or another had been part of TT’s arsenal to fight crime since 2004. The first system, called Heritage, was a data acquisition system that compiled a database for ammunition casings. The technology was upgraded in 2010 with the acquisition of a bullet tracking system that would be able to align the markings made on bullets and casings as it is fired.

The latest upgrade in the ballistics detection system, IBIS, the casings will be rendered in 3D where older systems would have had it in 2D and in black and white, and its tracking systems should be able to match casings with the rounds in the database faster.

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