HOW TO SPOT A SERIAL OFFENDER

摘要

Pooling national data on serious crimes seems like the obvious way to spot connections between them. In the US, this is done through a system called the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP), while Canada has the Violent Crime Linkage System (ViCLAS). Nine other countries use variants of these. Information-gathering begins with police filling out a questionnaire. It contains more than 100 questions covering all aspects of the crime, asking about the criminal's verbal or sexual behaviour as reported by the victim, for example. This information is sent electronically to a central bureau where analysts trained to look for patterns in behaviour can pore over it.