Criminal Justice Institutions

Violent Criminal Apprehension Program

Also Known As ViCAP

Citation Formats

General Reference

Crime and Justice Atlas. "Violent Criminal Apprehension Program." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://crime.interactiveatlas.org/institutions/vicap.

APA Style

Crime and Justice Atlas. (n.d.). Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://crime.interactiveatlas.org/institutions/vicap

BibTeX

@misc{crimeandjusticeatlas-violent-criminal-apprehension-program,
  author = {Crime and Justice Atlas},
  title = {Violent Criminal Apprehension Program},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://crime.interactiveatlas.org/institutions/vicap},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

A unit of the FBI responsible for the analysis of serial violent and sexual crimes, collecting details of unsolved and solved cases from agencies nationwide so investigators can search for links between crimes that might otherwise go unrecognized when an offender crosses jurisdictional lines.

Facts

Institution Typethe subject's own account

National case-linkage database and analysis unit, operated within the FBI. 1

Founded Year

1985 1

the subject's own accountPierce Brooks, a Los Angeles homicide detective who had proposed a national violent-crime database since the 1950s, was appointed ViCAP's first director; he has no live entity in this atlas yet, so his advocacy is recorded here rather than as a founded-by edge.

Headquartersthe subject's own account

Quantico, Virginia, United States 1

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

Federal Bureau of Investigation

ViCAP is a unit of the FBI.

Source Wikipedia: Violent Criminal Apprehension Program

Robert Ressler

Robert Ressler, a founding FBI Behavioral Science Unit profiler, worked alongside ViCAP in its early years as part of the FBI's behavioral analysis effort.

Source Wikipedia: Behavioral Science Unit

Sources

1. Wikipedia: Violent Criminal Apprehension Program

Function description

Quote, Function description

Cases fitting these categories can be entered into the system by law enforcement officials and compared to other cases in an attempt to correlate and match possible connections.

View the Source

1. Wikipedia: Violent Criminal Apprehension Program

Lead section

Quote, Lead section