The FBI has contributed to the confusion by misrepresenting the system. “We don’t really use ViCAP,” said Jeff Jensen, a criminal analyst for the Phoenix police department with 15 years of experience. Training has dropped from a high of about 5,500 officers in 2012 to 1,200 last year.
CRIMINAL MINDS SERIAL KILLERS IN OPENING CREDITS HOW TO
Many also said the FBI does little to teach cops how to use the system. Entering a single case into the database can take an hour and hits-where an unsolved crime is connected to a prior incident-are rare. Local cops say the system is confusing and cumbersome. “The need is vital,” said Ritchie Martinez, the former president of the International Association of Law Enforcement Intelligence Analysts.
Killers and rapists continue to escape arrest by exploiting that weakness. Police agencies still don’t talk to each other on many occasions. As a result, the program has done little to close the gap that prompted Congress to create it. Last year, the program provided analytical assistance to local cops just 220 times. Travel and training have been cut back in recent years. In an agency with an $8.2 billion yearly budget, ViCAP receives around $800,000 a year to keep the system going. But the FBI has never delivered on its promise. That revolution never came.įew law-enforcement officials dispute the potential of a system like ViCAP to help solve crimes. ViCAP was supposed to revolutionize American law enforcement. But three decades and an estimated $30 million later, the FBI’s system remains stuck in the past, the John Henry of data mining. It has proven particularly successful at analyzing sexual-assault cases. A review in the 1990s found it had linked only 33 crimes in 12 years.Ĭanadian authorities built on the original ViCAP framework to develop a modern and sophisticated system capable of identifying patterns and linking crimes.
It’s not even clear how many crimes the database has helped solve. The database receives reports from far less than 1 percent of the violent crimes committed annually. Only about 1,400 police agencies in the U.S., out of roughly 18,000, participate in the system. That’s what’s striking about ViCAP today: the paucity of information it contains. In a world where everything is measured, data is ubiquitous-from the number of pieces of candy that a Marine hands out on patrol in Kandahar, to your heart rate as you walk up the stairs at work. The FBI can parse your emails, cellphone records, and airline itineraries. Corporations can link the food you purchase, the clothes you buy, and the websites you browse. In the years since ViCAP was first conceived, data-mining has grown vastly more sophisticated, and computing power has become cheaper and more readily available. ViCAP’s “implementation could mean the prevention of countless murders and the prompt apprehension of violent criminals,” the late Senator Arlen Specter wrote in a letter to the Justice Department endorsing the program’s creation.
Savvy killers had attacked in different jurisdictions to exploit gaping holes in police cooperation. The system was rooted in the belief that some criminals’ methods were unique enough to serve as a kind of behavioral DNA-allowing identification based on how a person acted, rather than their genetic make-up.Įqually as important was the idea that local law-enforcement agencies needed a way to better communicate with each other. A serial rapist wielding a favorite knife in one attack might be identified when he used the same knife elsewhere. Dubbed the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, or ViCAP, it was a database designed to help catch the nation’s most violent offenders by linking together unsolved crimes. QUANTICO, Virginia-More than 30 years ago, the Federal Bureau of Investigation launched a revolutionary computer system in a bomb shelter two floors beneath the cafeteria of its national academy.