How the FBI's ViCAP Database Links Violent Crimes

In 2015, ProPublica reported that only about 1,400 of the roughly 18,000 police agencies in the United States took part in the FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, known as ViCAP. In 2024, a Justice Department inspector general audit counted 1,674 registered agencies, about 9 percent of the total. That number is the most important thing to know about the system. It can only link the crimes police put into it.

ViCAP is the FBI's national database for connecting violent crimes across jurisdictions. Here is where it came from, what goes into it, and why it has never worked as well as its founders hoped.

A detective's idea

The program grew out of one Los Angeles homicide detective's frustration. In the late 1950s, LAPD detective Pierce Brooks was working the murders of young women who worked as models. He suspected the killer had struck before. According to ProPublica, Brooks spent a year reading newspapers at a library looking for similar cases. The killings were tied to Harvey Glatman, who was later executed.

Brooks spent years pushing for a computer system that could run that search for every police department at once. In 1985, responding to a congressional mandate, the Justice Department established the FBI's National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, and the FBI created ViCAP inside it. ProPublica reported that the system went online on May 29, 1985. Brooks was its first director.

The problem it was built to solve was simple. A killer who crossed a county or state line could leave each local department holding one piece of a pattern that none of them could see. ViCAP was meant to put those pieces in one place.

What goes into the database

ViCAP does not take every crime. Under the FBI's criteria, as listed in the inspector general's July 2024 audit, it accepts four kinds of cases. Homicides and attempted homicides that are apparently random, motiveless, or sexually oriented, or are known or suspected to be part of a series. Sexual assaults committed by a stranger, or known or suspected to be part of a series. Missing persons cases where the circumstances indicate a strong possibility of foul play and the victim is still missing. And unidentified human remains where the manner of death is known or suspected to be homicide.

What separates ViCAP from a DNA database like CODIS is the kind of information it holds. CODIS stores genetic profiles. ViCAP stores descriptions of what happened: the victim, the location, how the offender approached and controlled the victim, and what was done at the scene. The audit puts it directly: the program's success in linking crimes depends on the quantity and quality of the behavior-based information agencies enter.

Since the summer of 2008, the database has been available to law enforcement agencies through a secure internet connection, so a registered detective can search it directly.

Who runs it

ViCAP sits inside one of the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Units, part of the Critical Incident Response Group, at Quantico, Virginia. It is staffed by crime analysts, each assigned a region of the country, and by contracted developers who maintain the system. Analysts review entries, search for possible links, and send their analysis to the agencies involved. They can also issue ViCAP Alerts asking other departments for information about a case. In 2015, ProPublica reported that the program ran on about $800,000 a year with a staff of 12 analysts.

The FBI's behavioral side also produced the working definition investigators use for serial murder. At a symposium the FBI hosted in San Antonio, Texas, from August 29 to September 2, 2005, experts agreed on this definition: the unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender or offenders in separate events. Many earlier definitions had required three victims. The FBI definition sets no minimum time between killings.

Why participation matters

For most agencies, entering a case into ViCAP is voluntary, and for years few did. ProPublica's 2015 investigation found the database held about 89,000 cases after three decades and received reports on far less than 1 percent of the violent crimes committed each year. Detectives told the outlet that the entry process was cumbersome. The original form had 189 questions. It was later cut to 95.

Canada took a different approach. Police there are required to enter qualifying cases into a similar system, ViCLAS, and ProPublica reported that it held more than 500,000 case records.

Some states have since made entry mandatory. Texas did it in 2019 and Georgia in 2021, and the Justice Department's Sexual Assault Kit Initiative made ViCAP entry a condition of its grants. According to the inspector general, submissions rose from 463 in fiscal year 2018 to 13,750 in fiscal year 2023, an increase of almost 3,000 percent.

The 2024 audit

That growth created a new problem. The inspector general found that ViCAP's technology, staffing, and funding had stayed essentially flat while submissions surged. The result was a backlog of almost 19,000 case entries waiting for quality-control review. From October 31, 2022, through September 30, 2023, ViCAP delayed or denied 101 of 232 eligible requests for analysis, more than 40 percent, because of analyst workload.

Participation was still thin. As of October 15, 2023, 1,674 agencies were registered users out of about 18,500 nationwide. The New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago police departments together entered 63 cases between fiscal years 2017 and 2020, far fewer than the murders and rapes they reported to the FBI in those years. Chicago entered none from fiscal 2021 through 2023. The audit found the FBI had no comprehensive strategy and no performance metrics for the program, and recommended that it evaluate what staff and money ViCAP actually needs.

What it can do when it works

The audit's own example of success is Samuel Little, who confessed to murdering almost 100 people across 19 states between 1970 and 2005. According to the inspector general, ViCAP played an instrumental role in convicting him by identifying what his cases had in common.

That is the system at its best, and it explains the limits too. ViCAP is not a profiler with a hunch. It is a records system, and it is only as good as what goes into it. A case that never gets entered cannot be linked to anything.

Sources

1. Audit of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (DOJ Office of the Inspector General, July 2024)
2. The FBI Built a Database That Can Catch Rapists - Almost Nobody Uses It (T. Christian Miller, ProPublica, July 2015, republished by Florida Bulldog)
3. Serial Murder: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives for Investigators (FBI monograph, abstract via Office of Justice Programs)
4. Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (Wikipedia)

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