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DAO and gun-violence task force credit digital forensics, grand juries for drops in shootings and warn funding gaps could halt lab work
Summary
Gun-violence task force leaders told council a $15 million digital evidence lab and state support have been central to investigations that dismantled shooting groups; they warned a $1.6 million annual funding shortfall would force the digital forensics lab to shut down key functions.
William (Bill) Fritzy, chief of the District Attorney's gun-violence task force, told council the unit relies on a combination of license-plate readers, city and private cameras, social-media analysis and phone extractions to identify and charge shooters and trafficking networks.
Fritzy said the state awards $14 million for a joint statewide task-force program, and Philadelphia's share under the fiscal code is $1.6 million (about 20% of the state allocation). He warned that without continued or matching funding to sustain software licenses and equipment maintenance the digital forensics lab that was built with a one-time $15 million investment would not be able to operate at full capacity. "We're asking, you know, for 1.6 to keep the lights on and keep the software going," Fritzy said.
Both DA Kraner and Fritzy described how license-plate readers and public/private camera footage narrow a universe of possible cars and people, and how phone extractions and geolocation data can place a device at a scene. The task force also uses cell-phone extraction machines and a software service called Guardian; Fritzy said the office has processed thousands of phones through the lab and is now able to account for which phones are extracted and used in court.
The witnesses described concrete outcomes tied to the lab's work: multi-defendant grand jury investigations, longer aggregate sentences when multiple shootings are charged together, and neighborhood-level reductions in shootings where task-force investigations targeted groups. Kraner and Fritzy pointed to a recent operation that seized 16 guns and to an arrest for manufacturing silencers as examples of the unit's operations.
Council members asked about metrics and asked the task force to supply data that links lab outputs (phones processed, cases referred to grand jury) to neighborhood crime reductions. Fritzy said the unit already reports to state funders and that it deploys metrics such as time-to-incarceration and case disposition timelines. "We know that we've doubled each year the amount of phones," he said, adding the DAO has processed about 2,600 phones through its systems to date.
Task force leaders also discussed legal and privacy constraints, grand-jury secrecy and the need for lawyer-led technology units to reduce risk in evidence handling. They urged council to sustain recurring funding for the lab and annual license renewals so that the investigative tools remain available to prosecutors and police.
