ViCAP
Definition
The FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, a national database established in 1985 for the comparison and linkage of violent crime cases across jurisdictions.
- Agency
- FBI
- Established
- 1985
- Purpose
- Cross-jurisdiction linkage of violent crime cases
- Coverage
- United States national database
Common questions
How does ViCAP compare to Canada's ViCLAS system?+
ViCAP is the FBI's national US database, while ViCLAS was developed later by the RCMP with a more structured set of behavioural fields and has since been adopted by around fifteen other countries beyond Canada.
What limitation has ViCAP historically faced?+
Case submission from local and state agencies was for years inconsistent and the data entry process cumbersome, which limited how complete and searchable the database actually was for investigators.
Related terms
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- The FBI unit, descended from the BSU, that provides behavioural evidence analysis support to homicide, sexual assault, terrorism, and threat-assessment investigations in...
- Criminal Investigative Analysis (CIA)
- The FBI BSU's formal method for profiling unknown offenders from crime-scene evidence, involving a structured analytical process that produces an offender description...
- ENFSI IP Working Group
- The European Network of Forensic Science Institutes Investigative Psychology Working Group, which sets standards for behavioural analysis practice across EU member states,...
- Equivocal Forensic Analysis
- The first stage of Behavioral Evidence Analysis (BEA), in which the analyst reviews all physical evidence without assumption about the offender to...
- Investigative Psychology
- David Canter's empirically grounded approach to behavioural analysis, using multivariate statistical methods and systematic case comparison rather than clinical inference from interview-based...
- Organised vs Disorganised Typology
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