The case for tracing
In 2010 the United Kingdom’s National Ballistic Intelligence Service (NBIS) received a request to research the origin of three Glock pistols recovered in the North West of England. Within days, it had established that the weapons had been purchased from a weapons manufacturer in North Carolina, United States.
This was possible thanks to close collaboration with the American Bureau for Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) and the use of eTrace, its online tracing tool, explains Ian Head, the NBIS’s Intelligence Manager.
Not only was the point of sale of the guns identified, so were the serial numbers of 80 further firearms that had been purchased from the same manufacturer in a six-month period. Sadly, the intelligence could not prevent one of the Glocks in question from being used as a murder weapon in the United Kingdom nine months later. But the knowledge about the weapon’s history gave investigators a head start in solving the crime.
In Toronto, Canada’s largest city, a community called Jamestown was cowed into resigned silence by persistent gang violence, drug trafficking and a series of murders. The police decided to trace all the firearms seized in the neighborhood during the previous five years, recounts Vincent Paris, Assistant Crown Attorney and Counsel to the Toronto Police. Many of them came from a small town on the Texas-Oklahoma border, 2,400 kilometers away. The ATF located an individual who had purchased several hundred firearms at this store over the years. Further investigation revealed details of cohorts bringing large quantities of guns and drugs over the border. As a result of the tracing, an entire smuggling ring was shut down, and the Toronto suburb is a safer place.
A footnote to the story is that a DVD with a musical number performed by the Jamestown gang outlining their control of drugs and violence in the town provided the first evidence permitting the police to initiate the investigation. The smugglers were later shocked to learn that they were dismantled due to a seven-minute rap video.
Both of these stories illustrate an important point: tracing firearms is a valuable aid in fighting crime. Platforms such as eTrace, used in the two cases described above, and iARMS, a similar web-based information exchange system recently launched for the 190 member countries of INTERPOL, are powerful investigative and analytical tools. They can make it possible not just to arrest and prosecute a particular suspect, but to shut down a whole criminal network.
“Successful tracing involves three major challenges: marking, record keeping and co-operation among states,” says Glenn McDonald of the Geneva-based research institute Small Arms Survey.
“If you look at a firearm that has been seized, you should see a serial number inscribed onto the frame or receiver. For the marking to be of any value to you, you need to know not only the general type of firearm but also the specific model, because many manufacturers repeat the same serial numbers. This requires expertise,” he explains.
“Secondly, good record keeping is essential,” he continues. “You’re dependent upon existing records to tell you about changes in ownership of the small arm or light weapon, to reconstruct its entire history. Perhaps you have to go all the way back in time to when it was manufactured. If you’re lucky, you can access a much more recent point in time, the last legal import.”
“The third challenge is co-operation among states. Many states are not yet fully aware of the value and importance of placing and answering tracing requests. This is the area where there is the most work to be done, and it is especially here that the OSCE can help,” McDonald concludes.
The OSCE participating States have been working together to tackle the proliferation of illicit small arms since they adopted the Document on Small Arms and Light Weapons in 2000. The document sets out commitments relating to the production, transfer, storage, collection, seizure, destruction and also the tracing of weapons.
Some of the OSCE’s provisions on tracing complement those of the 2006 International Tracing Instrument, the major international agreement on tracing. An example is the recommendation that governments abstain from the practice of delivering stocks of unmarked weapons to other governments, who will want to enter their own markings, to avoid the danger that these might be diverted along the way.
But even more important is the OSCE’s political work to encourage participating States to make use of tracing tools, which it pursues in weekly discussions in the Forum for Security Co-operation and conferences that bring together government officials and experts on small arms and light weapons.
Armed conflict
Tracing is used routinely in criminal investigations, but what about monitoring weapons flow in armed conflict? Perhaps not surprisingly, little has been done to date, as it is difficult to access weapons from within a conflict zone.
“From the perspective of illicit weapons transfers, conflicts are generally opaque to external observers. This is because the majority of trafficking into conflict zones is by land – by vehicle or on foot – rather than by air or sea. There are consequently few international monitoring mechanisms available to identify illicit supply routes and traffickers precisely. This is compounded by the fact that illicit transfer by manufacturing states directly into armed conflicts is rare and most illicit transfers are re-transfers, orchestrated by states within the conflict-affected region,” says James Bevan, who heads the institute Conflict Armament Research.
Conflict Armament Research has done pioneering work in physically documenting illicit arms supply in conflicts in Africa. “Documenting conflict weapons on site and conducting parallel studies into trafficking dynamics arguably provides the most solid evidence for weapons transfers into armed conflict, elucidating precise transfer dynamics and responsible parties,” Bevan explains.
“Weapons don’t have to be physically seized; if one can get close enough to take a photo, that can be enough to trace them with the right amount of expertise,” he adds.
Conflict Armament Research has a growing dataset approaching 20,000 individual records from conflict areas across Africa. The larger the database, the more powerful it becomes for analysis. Data can be profiled by country, by actor or by year of manufacture, showing, for instance, a peak year for weapons of a certain type.
The institute expects to present the data in a free public access global online mapping portal called iTrace in early 2014.
Technology – promises and limits
Advances in technology are opening up new opportunities for tracing. Electronic devices can be used to constrain the use of a weapon to a legitimate user, prevent its use in certain areas, to disable it via remote control or record and monitor its use.
On the other hand, advances in affordable 3D printing of objects are showing that tracing, no matter how diligently pursued, has its limits. Already today, criminals can download weapons designs from the Internet and produce usable throwaway guns that disregard tracing requirements.
For the foreseeable future, however, the main threat from small arms and light weapons will come from the millions of arms in circulation that have been traditionally produced and duly marked by legitimate manufacturers. The OSCE region includes major weapons producers and exporters, and most illicit traffic is diverted from the legal market. By co-operating on tracing, the OSCE can help to stem this traffic, in its own and in other areas of the world.
Find out more!
OSCE Document on Small Arms and Light Weapons (2000) //www.osce.org/fsc/20783
OSCE Handbook of Best Practices on Small Arms and Light Weapons (2003) //www.osce.org/fsc/13616
OSCE Plan of Action on Small Arms and Light Weapons (2010) //www.osce.org/fsc/68450
The Inaugural Conference on tracing illicit small arms and light weapons in the OSCE area, organized by the OSCE, INTERPOL, UNODC and UNODA, was held on 23 and 24 May 2013 in Vienna.