Weekend Reading Assignment

Your reading assignment for this weekend is the latest piece by David Bernstein of the Boston Phoenix. And, yes, there may be a quiz.

Bad Ballistics

The smoking gun. It is the icon of investigative perfection, of irrefutable evidence connecting criminal to crime. Yet it is more than mere symbol: the reports and testimony of the Boston Police Department’s (BPD) ballistics unit have been critical to putting hundreds of people in prison since the lab opened 40 years ago, and dozens more every year.

But the Phoenix has discovered that these firearms examiners — the officers who analyze bullets and cartridge casings to determine whether a particular gun was used for a particular crime — are ill-trained and inept. Compared with their counterparts in big cities like New York, smaller cities like Pittsburgh, or states like Illinois, Boston’s firearms examiners are amateurs, who would not qualify to work in those other jurisdictions.

[snip]

Until two weeks ago, nobody outside the BPD seems to have known whether the department even tested its firearms examiners. Then, on the stand during a pre-trial hearing in Suffolk Superior Court, Detective Tyrone Camper surprised the prosecutor and defense attorneys by saying that in his eight years in the unit, he had been given "four or five" proficiency tests by the unit’s previous commander, Mark Vickers, the most recent being perhaps a year and a half ago. In each, he had been given several shell casings and told to determine which of them did and which did not come from the gun provided.

Camper could not recall all of his results, but he knew that he failed some, and he believed that he may have passed some.

A week later, on the stand again, Camper recanted. "I have come to learn that I have not failed any" proficiency tests, he said. "I have come to learn that I have passed them."

Anyone else as flush with confidence as I am?

As they say, RTWT.