ROCHESTER, N.Y. — The Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives helps get illegal guns off the streets right here in Rochester. News10NBC’s Hailie Higgins sat down with ATF agents and their partners to see how they’re doing that in our area.

“Every crime gun that gets recovered in the city of Rochester and across the country we aim to trace,” said Sean Martineck, Senior Special Agent with the ATF.

At any given time, on any given day, one of Michael Curran’s ten agents is on duty, ready to help police respond to a shooting in our area. Curran, the Agent in Charge of the Rochester ATF, says more often these days those shootings involve ghost guns. That’s a gun made privately, not by a manufacturer, which makes them harder to trace. But not impossible through NIBIN – the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network.

“Without the NIBIN ballistic matching, we would never know that a gun that fired at somebody in Rochester also fired at somebody in Syracuse,” said Curran.

Along with Dave Phelps’ analysis at the Monroe County Crime Analysis Center, the federal agents work to get every bit of intel they can from casings and other evidence left at crime scenes. Their goal is to stop the flow and the creation of illegal guns in Rochester.

“The Crime Analysis Center network in New York State, there’s no other system of criminal intelligence centers connected across every city and state in any other state. It’s the only one,” said Phelps, Director of the Monroe County Crime Analysis Center.

All local police and sheriff’s departments have access to these state and federal resources. The investigators can help pull records, intel, and evidence from nearly any department in the country, without worrying about jurisdiction.

“One of the problems that we have is criminals don’t have a jurisdiction, police departments do,” said Curran.

Federal jurisdiction also comes into play in local arrests. The ATF may step in to keep a person behind bars longer to try and stop repeat offenses. Investigators tell Higgins Rochester’s inter-agency teamwork is unusually strong and the biggest asset in the fight against illegal guns.

“I’ve never seen an office like this personally. We all help each other out because the common goal is to reduce crime,” said Martineck.

ATF agents tell us all the guns you saw on the table there were ghost guns they took off the streets. They say last year NIBIN helped generate 701 leads in our area and linked guns to 18 different homicides.

Learn more about the ATF and its partnerships here.

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