City police take gun forensics in-house

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This article was published 16/05/2025 (315 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Manitoba law enforcement will now be able to determine if the same gun was used in multiple shootings in just days — rather than a year.

The Winnipeg Police Service’s firearms investigative analysis section will now inspect markings left on spent casings — the piece of cartridge or shell left behind after a bullet is fired — and compare them to other casings in a national database for all law enforcement agencies in Manitoba.

That will allow Manitoba police agencies to link shootings committed with the same gun in multiple jurisdictions in the province much quicker than in the past, Winnipeg police Deputy Chief Cam Mackid said Friday.

“There’s no more serious crime than a firearm offence… a third of all (Winnipeg) homicide victims are killed by gun violence,” said Mackid. “This is a benefit to public safety.”

Mackid compared shell casing analysis to taking fingerprints.

“Shell casings also are very unique — they’re much like fingerprints. We don’t identify an actual offender to a shell casing… but we can link that specific casing with a specific weapon, and we can link that specific casing with another casing that’s found at a different scene,” said Mackid, adding WPS can now do that analysis in three days or less.

The Winnipeg police firearms lab has been able to analyze and compare spent casings found in city investigations since 2020, but previously, the evidence would have to be sent to the RCMP’s national laboratory in Ottawa.

Capacity issues at the national lab meant it could sometimes take as long as a year for results to come back.

“If we had a shooting here in Winnipeg, say we had one in St. Vital, and three days later we had one in Transcona, (then) maybe a homicide downtown, all involving a firearm, and we seized casings, historically, that had taken up to a year for us to get results back… to see if we could link them together,” said Mackid.

“It’s just too long a time period to be effective.”

A new injection of just under $450,000 in provincial government funding has now allowed city police to expand capacity to take casings from cops outside the Perimeter Highway, so those agencies don’t have to send their evidence to the Ottawa RCMP lab either.

“We know that jurisdictions aren’t really respected by the criminal element, so we could have an incident we’ve got linked up here in Winnipeg, but we don’t know for a year that it’s linked to a shooting in Brandon or up north, in a First Nation jurisdiction,” said Mackid.

“Now we’re going to have that capacity to take casings provincewide and make those links very fast.”

The WPS uses the RCMP’s Canadian Integrated Ballistic Identification Network to compare their digital images of casings with other images of casings in a national database.

Mackid said the use of the new system has allowed local officers to develop more than 200 investigative leads on gun crimes through the database since 2020, linking incidents both locally and across Canada.

The Friday announcement is part of a planned expansion to create a full provincial gun-crime laboratory run by Winnipeg police, with the same capabilities as the RCMP facility in Ottawa.

The province, under the prior Progressive Conservative government, first committed $5.2 million to the new gun lab project in the summer of 2023. The government has committed about $3.2 million in annual funding for the lab, NDP Justice Minister Matt Wiebe said Friday.

Wiebe said expanding capacity at the city lab will ensure “gun criminals will have nowhere to hide anywhere in our province” and alleviate strain on the RCMP’s national facility.

Further renovations at the existing facility at WPS headquarters will start later this year, which will allow police to also analyze firearms seized by other law enforcement agencies in the province, on top of their spent casings.

The final phase of the expansion will be the construction of a new firearms lab, complete with in-house scientists that will complete further analysis needed for court proceedings, at a new secure site.

erik.pindera@freepress.mb.ca