CLEVELAND — The City of Cleveland wants to stop crime before it happens. That’s why the city is opening a Crime Gun Intelligence Center (CGIC) to keep the streets safer.

Sgt. Freddy Diaz of the Cleveland Police Department said he hopes the new CGIC coming to Cleveland will help prevent crime and close cases. 

“We believe, like anything else, advancements in technology — not only in law enforcement, but across the country, phones, and you know all these resources that people are utilizing,” he said.

The Cleveland Police Department and other agencies like the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) worked together to launch this center, which opens this month. The center looks to bring together police officers from cities across northeast Ohio. It’ll also include crime analysts, federal agents and gun experts, all with the common goal of preventing deadly crimes from happening in the city.  

So far this year, Cleveland has had 17 homicides. Last year around this time, there were about 30, according to data from the City of Cleveland. Most of the homicides in 2023 involved guns. Diaz expects this number to go down even more as the crime center advances.

“To combine resources and assistance in identifying folks that are using guns to commit violence in our neighborhoods,” he said.

Diaz said each casing from a gun is like a fingerprint and the technology will allow officers to track down criminals.

“We’ll retrieve a bullet casing, test it and identify it. It’s almost like a fingerprint attached to a gun. So through ballistic testing, we can hopefully combine and say this shooting that occurred is connected to a shooting that occurred in this location," he said.

Diaz said this technology is just one piece of the puzzle but should help put criminals behind bars and play a big part in preventing crime.