ViCLAS
Definition
Violent Crime Linkage Analysis System; the RCMP-developed database capturing 168 behavioural and physical fields from serious violent crimes in Canada and adopted by 15 other countries.
- Developer
- Royal Canadian Mounted Police
- Data captured
- 168 behavioural and physical crime fields
- Adoption
- Canada plus about 15 other countries
- Purpose
- Serial violent-crime linkage analysis
Common questions
What kinds of cases go into ViCLAS?+
Serious violent and sexual crimes, including homicide, sexual assault, and missing-persons cases where foul play is suspected, are entered using the standardised behavioural and physical fields.
How does ViCLAS actually help solve serial offences?+
It flags similarities in modus operandi and other behavioural details across cases logged by different police services, surfacing potential links between crimes that no single agency would otherwise connect.
Related terms
- Behavioural Consistency
- The tendency of a serial offender to repeat the same distinctive behaviours across multiple offences; one of the two necessary conditions for...
- Behavioural Distinctiveness
- The property that the consistent behaviours in question are rare enough across unrelated offenders that shared possession of them cannot easily be...
- Linkage Analysis
- The investigative and forensic method of determining whether two or more crimes were committed by the same person, based on the presence...
- Modus Operandi (MO)
- The functional, learned behaviours the offender uses to commit the offence: how to gain entry, control the victim, complete the act, and...
- ROC / AUC Analysis
- Receiver Operating Characteristic / Area Under the Curve analysis; the statistical method used to measure the discriminative accuracy of a linkage system,...
- Signature
- Psychologically expressive behaviours that go beyond what's needed to complete the offence: posing the body, ritual acts, taking trophies, leaving messages. Signature...