Florida’s Volusia County Sheriff’s Office (VCSO) is the first law enforcement agency in the nation to implement ClearCase, a groundbreaking forensic device designed to accelerate the investigation of gun-related crimes.
“We have a sheriff who made a commitment many years ago that we will try every tool that’s out there that’s legally available to us to stop violent crime,” VCSO Deputy Chief Brian Henderson told FOX35. “This is like DNA for a gun.”
The initiative, made possible through a partnership between LeadsOnline and VCSO, enables investigators to document and analyze shell casings at crime scenes with unprecedented speed and accuracy. Using only a cell phone, officers can photograph and record details about shell casings, including their location and quantity. This data is then uploaded to a national firearm database, allowing law enforcement agencies across the country to collaborate on linked cases.
If a shooting occurs in Daytona Beach, investigators say they could quickly determine whether the shell casings match those from a crime scene in another state, such as Georgia.
“Before, when we had the NIBIN [National Integrated Ballistic Identification Network] machine, our deputies would respond to a drive-by shooting, and that would be all over the ground,” Henderson says. “What we would have to do is collect these shell casings and send them to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which serves the entire Central Florida region.”
Henderson adds that this process occasionally caused in a year-long backlog to receive data.
“We have a 100% homicide clearance rate,” he explains. “We have an 80% violent crime clearance rate from 2024. If you look across the country, the average clearance rate is about 44%.”
Once photographed, the casings are labeled and placed into the ClearCase machine, which sorts and analyzes them. The shell casings date could also help solve older cases.
“We’ve had that happen where we recover a gun, a felon possession of a firearm, we bring it in, test fire it and, sure enough, that gun was linked to a homicide from five or six years ago,” Henderson says. “It takes us from having no leads at all to having some pretty important leads.”
