Police Reviving Program To Recover Illegal Guns

Even when police find illegal guns, the U.S. attorney's office might choose not to prosecute. Bray said the city is asking federal prosecutors to be as aggressive as possible.

Jeffrey A. Taylor, interim U.S. attorney for the District, vowed that his office will work closely with the unit. "If you are a criminal in the possession of a gun, we're not going to make deals," he said.

Taylor added that the new investigations and gun recoveries could help close open homicide cases by giving officers forensic evidence to link shell casings with firearms.

"The more guns you get off the street, the better we often are at solving unsolved crimes," he said.

In recent years, most of the city's gun trafficking cases were investigated by agents from the D.C. office of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said Edgar A. Domenech, the office's special agent in charge. He acknowledged, however, that the agency's ability to curb gun trafficking in the city was limited. Further hindering ATF's progress was the fact that federal investigators typically didn't receive D.C. police reports on gun arrests for five to seven days, a critical delay.

With the new police unit and increased cooperation between local and federal officers, officials expect that stronger cases will be built against suspects and that gun-related violence will diminish.

A similar local-federal partnership in Richmond has contributed to a 40 percent drop in homicides in parts of that city since June 2005, Domenech said.

As part of the program, several D.C. detectives will be deputized as ATF officers, allowing them to cross borders to investigate guns that end up in the District.

The unit will operate in six of the city's seven police districts. The 2nd Police District in upper Northwest is omitted because it has relatively low rates of violent crime and gun recoveries, Bray said.

Some days, the unit will employ "high-intensity traffic stops," pulling over cars for minor offenses to try to establish probable cause to search vehicles. Officers also will use informants to help them secure search warrants for suspected gun holders.

For Sloan, the first goal is for the unit's officers to be "as legally aggressive as possible" and to know the hot spots for violence and gun trafficking. That ultimately will help reduce shootings, he said.

"Your gunman is your most heinous criminal," Sloan said. "You're going to see a downward trend of violent crime. It has to be."

Staff writer Allison Klein contributed to this report.