GBI Director Vernon Keenan and other law enforcement leaders will meet with U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions next week to seek help solving a critical shortage of ballistics experts.
Keenan said the shortage of firearms examiners is a national problem and one linked to training and funding. It takes two years to train examiners in this specialized field and there's a shortage of trainers.
“We’re asking the attorney general to increase the capacity for ATF to train firearms examiners,” said Keenan, referring to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. “They can only do 25 a year. We need them to be doing 300 because it’s a national problem.”
Georgia is near the top in gun-related fatalities and those incidents have been rising.
Even as Georgia has increased funding to state crime lab s, the demands of new cases have outpaced that support. The agency has a backlog of 3,409 requests for ballistics testing from investigators and prosecutors across the state.
And the GBI falls further behind each month because it doesn’t have enough firearms examiners to keep pace with the number of requests for tests coming from across Georgia. The agency has twice as many requests coming in each month as its able to clear.
Currently GBI has nine trained firearms scientists with six more on the way once they complete training. But the training comes with a cost. GBI examiners have to take time away from their jobs to administer training.
Keenan said the issue along with other challenges facing state and local law enforcement is on the agenda when they meet in Arizona at the conference of the State Association of Criminal Investigative Agencies.
Keenan said he’s optimistic Sessions will hear their concerns and act. He said the Trump administration and Sessions have done a lot to improve relations with state and local law enforcement executives.
“We feel comfortable talking to the attorney general because he listens and is supportive of local and state law enforcement,” Keenan said. “The president and attorney general have been very vocal in their support of the police.”
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