Wichita State’s Innovation Campus to add $75 million building to help combat gun crimes

A new $75 million building on Wichita State’s Innovation Campus will house a federal laboratory that will process shell casings to help law enforcement agencies across the country solve gun-related crimes.

The building also will house the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

The opening of the lab in the new building will create roughly 100 new jobs, Republican U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran said a news conference Monday.

The expansion comes after the ATF announced the opening of a “first-of-its kind” Crime Gun Intelligence Center of Excellence in June on Innovation Campus. The new forensics lab will be constructed on Innovation Camus where the current center sits.

The new lab will be the home of agency’s National Integrated Ballistic Information Network correlation center that will expand the agency’s work on gun-related crimes.

An NIBIN correlation center “conducts ballistics image correlations and returns investigative leads” to thousands of law enforcement agencies in the U.S., according to the ATF website.

There are 258 NIBIN sites in the U.S., including 8 ATF sites.

The Crime Center Intelligence Center of Excellence already uses NIBIN machines to examine shell casings from scenes to determine if they were used in other crimes. The new lab will see more casings that can be examined.

“That’s what we have been starting to do at our other facility,” said ATF Director Steven Dettelbach. “Quite frankly, this technology is so exciting to law enforcement that they’re outstripping our capacity.”

The new lab will allow ATF to handle requests from all around the country. In addition, The lab will use DNA tracing tools on guns, Dettelbach added.

”The capability will be expanded at least two-fold by the arrival of ATF on the Innovation Campus,” Dettelbach said.

Wichita State will complement the expansion by creating new curriculum for criminal justice students on crime intelligence and other emerging investigative technology.

The courses will be developed and offered in collaboration with ATF, Moran said.

Construction on the lab building is expected to begin in the next several months. A name for the building has not been selected, Moran said.