@firefly,
Devil's Advocate: The way women dress out or in the workplace is designed to accentuate their sexuality. Tops reveal the neckline, upper chest, and even clevage. Skirts show their legs, etc. To envision this better, imagine men wearing business suit attire that shows their pecs and hairy legs. You never ever see that.
Everything but hands and face is covered on men. Much is uncovered on women.
While not all women do this, many to most do. It gives them an advantage in the business world to use their sexuality for their own benefit. While that's not 'asking to be raped' it is 'flaunting' their sexuality. Until men and women both cover up, one's using their sexuality then hypocritically complaining about being sexualized. Sorry, but who dressed you this morning, yourself or a man?
I have been noticing a growing movement from the feminists to discourage the showing of the female erotic form, which comes as no surprise because for the most part they dont like sex between males and females. A couple of chains stores in the last week have bowed to pressure to completely cover the cover of Cosmo and a couple of others because they "objectify women", which is code for show the female erotic form. The feminists dont want everyone in burkas but they do want to pressure women to go in that direction. Being fat is a plus too. Hopefully women tell them to **** off. It is very disappointing to this former liberal that it is the Left that it is claiming that the female form is shameful, I had hoped they they would have been better able to regulate their aversion to sex. It is the young feminists who are driving this, they are now going after anyone who gets off on looking at beautiful women, and all women who desire to look pleasing to males.
@hawkeye10,
Quote:I have been noticing a growing movement from the feminists to discourage the showing of the female erotic form, which comes as no surprise because for the most part they dont like sex between males and females. A couple of chains stores in the last week have bowed to pressure to completely cover the cover of Cosmo and a couple of others because they "objectify women", which is code for show the female erotic form.
No, this is not a "growing movement from the feminists"--who, as usual you fail to name
. Cosmopolitan magazine has always had strong feminist leanings and identification, and an editorial policy that promotes interest in, and enjoyment of, sex as well. As a woman's magazine, primarily aimed at young heterosexual women, Cosmo isn't going after a reader " who gets off on looking at beautiful women" on their covers, although their covers have always celebrated female beauty and eroticism, and their articles have advised women on how to achieve and maintain such attributes.
And the current controversy over the Cosmo covers has little to do with the "erotic" appearance of the cover model--it mainly has to do with the nature of the articles featured on the cover--and the proposed cover shield would be U-shaped so it would cover the titles of featured articles but not completely cover the photo of the cover model.
So far, you haven't gotten anything right.
And the objections to the Cosmo covers aren't coming from your unnamed alleged "feminists"--they are spearheaded by a particular member of the Hearst family (the Hearst corporation publishes Cosmo) and her objections appear tied to right wing religious views. It's conservative religious extremists who always display the most aversion toward open discussions of sexuality and open displays of sexuality--a point you routinely disregard so you can erroneously promote "feminists", as a group, as being "anti-sex" or disliking "sex between males and females". So you are trying to characterize all 'feminists" as either asexual or homosexual?
Good grief, you have no connection to reality.
I suggest you read about who and what is actually behind the current brouhaha about the Cosmo covers...
And Cosmo magazine continues to send their own feminist message of female empowerment--which includes advice and discussion of female sexual empowerment--much to the consternation of religious extremists like Victoria Hearst...and they have no intention of changing that...
Quote:Ever since Gurley Brown took the reins at Cosmopolitan half a century ago this year, the magazine (and now the global brand) has been in the business of helping young women become better at being young women...
Cosmo has had a complicated relationship with professional feminists over the years — Betty Friedan called it “quite obscene and quite horrible,” but Gloria Steinem’s byline has appeared in it occasionally for decades. As the original popularizer of the American woman’s sexual liberation, the magazine has always had a kernel of feminism at its core — a broad, inclusive, highly generalized editorial message of women’s empowerment that doesn’t judge its readers for their ambitions, no matter what they are. It operates on the principle that wanting a happy love life or expertly done smoky eyes doesn’t make a woman frivolous. Neither does wanting to know how to give the perfect blow job.
The sex tips are still a major part of the brand. Over the past year, nearly every one of the magazine’s top-left cover lines has hit the same theme: “Best. Sex. Ever” (September), “38 Hot Sex Tricks” (December), “75 Crazy-Hot Sex Moves He’ll Think About All Year Long!” (January). But Coles has made it her very public mission, since she took over the top job in 2012, to change the perception of the magazine as little more than a monthly sex handbook with near-endless suggestions for penile amuses-bouches. She signed up Sheryl Sandberg as the magazine’s careers editor and told Capital New York, in 2013, that the magazine is interested equally in “mascara and the Middle East.” Over a plate of bacon at the Hearst cafeteria, she expanded on her idea of Cosmo feminism. “Feminism means, basically, are you in favor of equal opportunities for men and women? It’s hard to argue with that.” As for her editorial philosophy, she explains it this way: “It’s a bit like having a few drinks with someone in the bar, but usually in that conversation you’ll touch on two or three things which are a little bit more serious.” She even has a feminist-economic justification for the sex advice: “In Helen’s day, women used sex as a way to find a man to look after them,” Coles says. “Our reader doesn’t assume that she won’t be able to look after herself. And so I would say that we approach sex from the point of view of, How can this be fun for you?”
Feminism is stylish at the moment, of course, which alternately heartens and flummoxes its most ardent disciples. Taylor Swift and Beyoncé have made demonstrative alliances with feminism part of their appeal to young women. And an easy way for a beauty brand to get a viral nudge on an ad campaign is by inserting feminist overtones. (It can also function as a sort of armor: Sell your shampoo — or your sex tips — under the guise of empowering women, and no one can fault you for making them feel the need to spend money on making their hair softer and more touchable.)
The changes to Coles’s Cosmo have been incremental. In its September issue, the magazine ran an essay by Roxane Gay, a black, bisexual, breakout essayist, titled “Can You Be a Sexy Feminist?” (The answer: Yes.) The issue also contained a feature on an Occupy Wall Street protester who’d done jail time at Rikers, as well as the first interview with Jill Abramson after her firing from the New York Times, something of a true scoop and one that the magazine pursued intently. “I think it is interesting to readers when senior women, or groundbreaking women, get fired,” says Coles. “You’re thinking, Well, is sexism institutionalized across many industries, or was this just bad luck?” (Coles keeps a page proof of that story pinned up behind her desk, right next to a photo of her with Miley Cyrus.) There are also cheekier victories for womankind in the magazine, like the recommendation for ID Juicy Lube, in Cool Mint, $9.99 at Walgreens, and a service-y “Peen on Screen” guide...
http://nymag.com/thecut/2015/02/joanna-coles-cosmopolitan.html
Your simplistic thinking is so mired in downright ignorance you come across as a caricature of a not-too-bright over-the-hill anti-feminist male. You just can't understand things that involve any degree of complexity...and that includes an excellent article on "consent" you linked to earlier.
http://www.academia.edu/7481318/Spontaneous_Sexual_Consent_An_Analysis_of_Sexual_Consent_Literature
It seems to have gone right over your head. Problem is, those academic "feminist" scholars are much brighter and much deeper than you can fathom. You need everything dumbed down before you can digest it.
@hawkeye10,
Quote:It is very disappointing to this former liberal that it is the Left that it is claiming that the female form is shameful, I had hoped they they would have been better able to regulate their aversion to sex. It is the young feminists who are driving this, they are now going after anyone who gets off on looking at beautiful women, and all women who desire to look pleasing to males.
Well, you can stop feeling disappointed.
As usual, it's not the left-wing, or the "young feminists", claiming that the female form or sexuality is shameful--as you are erroneously asserting--it's the right-wing religious conservatives who are promoting that view--including their current attacks on Cosmo magazine as "porn".
Beside the religious fanatic, Victoria Hearst, trying to shield Cosmo's covers, she's teamed up with a group called the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, another religiously based group of pornography fighters. It was originally called Morality In Media when it was founded in 1962, as an
interfaith effort to combat pornography but changed its name earlier this year, "to better describe the organization’s scope and mission"--
http://endsexualexploitation.org/about-us/history/
It is not a feminist group. These were its founders...
Not exactly a group of "feminists".
The group continues to have "prayer alerts".
I think every time you use the word "feminists" a loud buzzer should go off as a BS alert.
Not that most people need that help--they are well aware of your BS and your need to construct strawmen to further your personal agenda. You can never even name the "feminists" you are talking about--and the business with trying to shield the Cosmo covers doesn't seem to involve any feminists at all--the objections are religiously based and come from sources with a religious bias.
And Cosmo, which asserts its feminist credentials, definitely isn't encouraging women to cover up in burkas or to get fat.
In other words, you don't know what the hell you are talking about...
You are quite pathetic.
And, while I'd much rather not waste any more time on you, or your various uninformed lies, it was just too tempting not to expose this latest hogwash on your part.
The FBI Built a Database That Can Catch Rapists, but Almost Nobody Uses It
Posted on Aug 6, 2015
By T. Christian Miller, ProPublica
This story was co-published by ProPublica and The Atlantic.
QUANTICO, Va. — 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. 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. A serial rapist wielding a favorite knife in one attack might be identified when he used the same knife elsewhere. 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.
Equally as important was the idea that local law enforcement agencies needed a way to better communicate with each other. Savvy killers had attacked in different jurisdictions to exploit gaping holes in police cooperation. ViCAP’s “implementation could mean the prevention of countless murders and the prompt apprehension of violent criminals,” the late Sen. Arlen Specter wrote in a letter to the Justice Department endorsing the program’s creation.
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. Corporations can link the food you purchase, the clothes you buy, and the websites you browse. The FBI can parse your emails, cellphone records and airline itineraries. 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.
That’s what’s striking about ViCAP today: the paucity of information it contains. Only about 1,400 police agencies in the U.S., out of roughly 18,000, participate in the system. The database receives reports from far less than 1 percent of the violent crimes committed annually. It’s not even clear how many crimes the database has helped solve. The FBI does not release any figures. A review in the 1990s found it had linked only 33 crimes in 12 years.
Canadian authorities built on the original ViCAP framework to develop a modern and sophisticated system capable of identifying patterns and linking crimes. It has proven particularly successful at analyzing sexual-assault cases. But three decades and an estimated $30 million later, the FBI’s system remains stuck in the past, the John Henry of data mining. ViCAP was supposed to revolutionize American law enforcement. That revolution never came.
Few law enforcement officials dispute the potential of a system like ViCAP to help solve crimes. But the FBI has never delivered on its promise. In an agency with an $8.2 billion yearly budget, ViCAP receives around $800,000 a year to keep the system going. The ViCAP program has a staff of 12. Travel and training have been cut back in recent years. Last year, the program provided analytical assistance to local cops just 220 times. As a result, the program has done little to close the gap that prompted Congress to create it. Police agencies still don’t talk to each other on many occasions. Killers and rapists continue to escape arrest by exploiting that weakness. “The need is vital,” said Ritchie Martinez, the former president of the International Association of Law Enforcement Intelligence Analysts. “But ViCAP is not filling it.”
Local cops say the system is confusing and cumbersome. 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. False positives are common. Many also said the FBI does little to teach cops how to use the system. Training has dropped from a high of about 5,500 officers in 2012 to 1,200 last year.
“We don’t really use ViCAP,” said Jeff Jensen, a criminal analyst for the Phoenix Police Department with 15 years of experience. “It really is quite a chore.”
The FBI has contributed to the confusion by misrepresenting the system. On its website, the FBI says cases in its database are “continually compared” for matches as new cases are entered. But in an interview, program officials said that does not happen. “We have plans for that in the future,” said Nathan Graham, a crime analyst for the program. The agency said it would update the information on its website.
The agency’s indifference to the database is particularly noteworthy at a time when emerging research suggests that such a tool could be especially useful in rape investigations.
For years, politicians and women’s advocates have focused on testing the DNA evidence in rape kits, which are administered to sexual assault victims after an attack. Such evidence can be compared against a nationwide database of DNA samples to find possible suspects. Backlogs at police departments across the country have left tens of thousands of kits untested.
But DNA is collected in only about half of rape cases, according to recent studies. A nationwide clearinghouse of the unique behaviors, methods, or marks of rapists could help solve those cases lacking genetic evidence, criminal experts said. Other research has shown that rapists are far more likely than killers to be serial offenders. Different studies have found that between one-fourth to two-thirds of rapists have committed multiple sexual assaults. Only about 1 percent of murderers are considered serial killers.
Studies have questioned the assumptions behind behavioral analysis tools like ViCAP. Violent criminals don’t always commit attacks the same way and different analysts can have remarkably different interpretations on whether crimes are linked. And a system that looks for criminal suspects on the basis of how a person acts is bound to raise alarms about Orwellian overreach. But many cops say any help is welcome in the difficult task of solving crimes like rape. A recent investigation by ProPublica and The New Orleans Advocate found that police in four states repeatedly missed chances to arrest the former NFL football star and convicted serial rapist Darren Sharper after failing to contact each other. “We’re always looking for tools,” said Joanne Archambault, the director of End Violence Against Women International, one of the leading police training organizations for the investigation of sexual assaults. “I just don’t think ViCAP was ever promoted enough as being one of them.”
The U.S. need only look north for an example of how such a system can play an important role in solving crimes. Not long after ViCAP was developed in the United States, Canadian law enforcement officials used it as a model to build their own tool, known as the Violent Criminal Linkage Analysis System, or ViCLAS. Today, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police maintains a database containing more than 500,000 criminal case profiles. The agency credits it with linking together some 7,000 unsolved crimes since 1995 – though not all of those linkages resulted in an arrest. If the FBI collected information as consistently as the Mounties, its database would contain more than 4.4 million cases, based on the greater U.S. population.
Instead, the FBI has about 89,000 cases on file.
Over the years, Canada has poured funding and staff into its program, resulting in a powerful analytical tool, said Sgt. Tony Lawlor, a senior ViCLAS analyst. One critical difference: in the U.S., reporting to the system is largely voluntary. In Canada, legislators have made it mandatory. Cops on the street still grumble about the system, which resembles the American version in the time and effort to complete. But “it has information which assists police officers, which is catching bad guys,” Lawlor said. “When police realize there’s a value associated with it, they use it.”
The ViCAP program eventually emerged from the fallout shelter where it began. It set up shop in an unmarked two-story brick office building in a Virginia business park surrounded by a printer’s shop, a dental practice and a Baptist church.
In a lengthy interview there, program officials offered a PowerPoint presentation with case studies of three serial killers who were captured in the past eight years with the help of the ViCAP program. They called the system “successful.”
“We do as good a job as we possibly can given our resources and limitations,” said Timothy Burke, a white-haired, 29-year agency veteran who is the program manager for ViCAP. “As with anything, we could always do better.”
Pierce Brooks was the father of the system.
A legendary cop, he had a square jaw, high forehead and dead serious eyes. During 20 years with the Los Angeles Police Department, he helped send 10 men to death row. He inspired the fictional Sgt. Joe Friday character in Dragnet. And he became famous for tracking down a pair of cop killers, a hunt chronicled in Joseph Wambaugh’s 1973 non-fiction bestseller, “The Onion Field.” “Brooks’ imagination was admired, but his thoroughness was legend,” Wambaugh wrote.
In the late 1950s, Brooks was investigating two murder cases. In each, a female model had been raped, slain and then trussed in rope in a manner that suggested skill with binding. Brooks intuited that the killer might commit other murders. For the next year, he leafed through out-of-town newspapers at a local library. When he read a story about a man arrested while trying to use rope to kidnap a woman, Brooks put the cases together. The man, Harvey Glatman, was sentenced to death, and executed a year later.
The experience convinced Brooks that serial killers often had “signatures” — distinct ways of acting that could help identify them much like a fingerprint. An early adopter of data-driven policing, Brooks realized that a computer database could be populated with details of unsolved murder cases from across the country, then searched for behavioral matches.
After Brooks spent years lobbying for such a system, Congress took interest. In July 1983, Brooks told a rapt Senate Judiciary Committee audience about serial killer Ted Bundy, who confessed to killing 30 women in seven states. The ViCAP system could have prevented many of those deaths, he said. “ViCAP, when implemented, would preclude the age-old, but still continuing problem of critically important information being missed, overlooked, or delayed when several police agencies, hundreds or even thousands of miles apart, are involved,” Brooks said in a written statement.
By the end of the hearing, Brooks had a letter from the committee requesting $1 million for the program. Although the program was endorsed by then-FBI director William Webster, agency managers weren’t particularly thrilled with the new idea.
The FBI grafted ViCAP into a new operation — the Behavioral Analysis Unit. The profilers, as they were known, were later made famous by Thomas Harris’ “The Silence of the Lambs” as brainy crime fighters who combined street smarts and psychology to nab the worst criminals. But at the time, the unproven unit was seen as a kind of skunk works. The FBI housed it in the former fallout shelter — “ten times deeper than dead people” as one agent later recalled. It was a warren of rooms, dark and dank. Others referred to the oddball collection of psychologists, cops and administrators as “rejects of the FBI” or the “leper colony,” according to “Into the Minds of Madmen,” a nonfiction account of the unit. Still, the new program captured the imagination of some. Murder mystery author Michael Newton penned a series of novels which, while not quite bestsellers, featured the heroic exploits of two ViCAP agents “accustomed to the grisly face of death and grueling hours on a job that has no end.”
Brooks was the first manager for the ViCAP program. The agency purchased what was then the “Cadillac” of computers — a VAX 11/785 nicknamed the “Superstar.” It filled up much of the room in the basement headquarters and had 512KB of memory. (An average household computer today has about 4,000 times more memory.) Brooks was “ecstatic” when the system finally came online on May 29, 1985, according to the account. His enthusiasm was not to last.
To get information into the database, local cops and deputies had to fill out by hand a form with 189 questions. The booklet was then sent to Quantico, where analysts hand-coded the information into the computer. It was a laborious process that flummoxed even Brooks. He had a hard time filling out the booklet, according to one account — as did officers in the field. Only a few hundred cases a year were being entered.
Enter Patricia Cornwell, the bestselling crime author, famous for her novels featuring Dr. Kay Scarpetta, medical examiner. In the early 1990s, she visited the subterranean unit during a tour of the academy. She recalled being distinctly unimpressed. An analyst told her that ViCAP didn’t contain much information. The police weren’t sending in many cases.
“I remember walking into a room at the FBI and there was one PC on a desk,” said Cornwell, who had once worked as a computer analyst. “That was ViCAP.” A senior FBI official had told Cornwell that the academy, of which ViCAP was a small part, was in a financial crunch. She contacted Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, a friend, and told him of the academy’s troubles. In 1993, Hatch shepherded a measure through Congress to put more money into the academy — and ViCAP.
As the money made its way to the bomb shelter, the FBI conducted a “business review.” It found that local cops were sending the agency only 3 to 7 percent of homicides nationwide. The miniscule staff — about 10 people — could not even handle that load, and was not entering the cases on a timely basis. Cops on the street saw the system as a “black hole,” according to “Cold Case Homicide,” a criminal investigation handbook.
The FBI decided to kill the program. They picked Art Meister to be the hit man.
Meister spent much of his career at the FBI busting organized crime, beginning at the New Jersey field office. He rose through the ranks to supervise a national squad of more than 30 agents, investigating mob activities at home and overseas. He had no real experience with behavioral analysis or databases. But he did have an analytical approach that his superiors admired. They gave him instructions: “If it doesn’t work, do away with it. Kill it,” recalled Meister, now a security consultant with the Halle Barry Group.
Meister heard plenty of complaints. At one conference of police officers from across the country, a cop pulled Meister aside to talk about the program. “I’ve used it and all it gives me is bullshit leads,” the officer told him. “The general perception was by and large that the program didn’t work,” Meister said.
But instead of killing ViCAP, Meister became the system’s unlikely champion. Even with its small staff, the program was connecting far-flung law-enforcement agencies. The 189 questions had been slimmed to 95 — making it easier to fill out the form. Meister used the new funding from Hatch’s bill to reach out to 10 large jurisdictions to persuade them to install terminals that could connect with the database. By 1997, the system was receiving 1,500 or so cases per year — a record, though still a fraction of the violent crimes committed.
Meister saw the potential for the database to help solve sexual-assault crimes. He pushed the development of new questions specifically for sexual-assault cases. They weren’t added to the system until after his departure in 2001. “I felt it would really pay off dividends,” Meister said. “There are a lot more serial rapists than serial killers.”
But he found it difficult to make headway. Top officials showed no real interest in the program. After all, it was designed to help local law enforcement, not the agency. Meister called ViCAP “the furthest planet from the sun” — the last in line to get funds from the FBI. His efforts to improve it “were met with skepticism and bureaucratic politics. That’s what drove me nuts,” he said.
By the time he left, the program was muddling along. “ViCAP never got the support that it needs and deserves.” Meister said. “It’s unfortunate.”
On July 13, 2007, at 4 in the morning, a 15-year-old girl was sleeping in her bedroom in Chelmsford, a former factory town in northeastern Massachusetts bisected by Interstate 495.
She was startled awake when a man dressed in black with a ninja mask pressed his hand against her face. He placed a knife to her throat and told her “If you make any noise, I’ll ******* kill you.”
The girl screamed, rousing her mother and father. The parents rushed in, fighting with the man until they subdued him. Adam Leroy Lane, a truck driver from North Carolina, was arrested. In his truck, Massachusetts police found knives, cord and a DVD of “Hunting Humans,” a 2002 horror film.
Analysts for ViCAP, which has a special initiative to track killings along the nation’s highways, determined that the Massachusetts attack was similar to an earlier murder that had been committed in New Jersey. Acting on the tip, New Jersey state police detectives interviewed Lane in his jail cell. Lane confessed to killing Monica Massaro, a 38-year-old woman, in her home in the town of Bloomsbury — just a few blocks off Interstate 78. Lane, dubbed the Highway Killer, was connected via DNA samples to a killing and a violent attack in Pennsylvania; both women lived near interstates. Lane is now serving a life sentence in Pennsylvania.
New Jersey State Police Detective Geoff Noble said his case had been stalled. But once ViCAP connected Noble to Massachusetts police officers, they provided him a receipt that placed Lane at the truck stop in the small town where Massaro was killed. And when Noble confronted Lane, the killer started talking. Under a state attorney general’s directive, all New Jersey law enforcement agencies are supposed to report serial crimes to ViCAP. “The information provided by ViCAP was absolutely critical,” Noble said. “Without ViCAP, that case may have not ever been solved.”
FBI officials said the case, one of three success stories provided to ProPublica, showed the critical role of the database. (The other two: The case of Israel Keyes, a murderer who committed suicide after his arrest in Alaska in 2012 and has been linked to 11 killings; and that of Bruce Mendenhall, a trucker now serving a life sentence in Tennessee who was linked to the murder of four women in 2007.) “Given what we have, it’s a very successful program,” Burke said.
But in a dozen interviews with current and former police investigators and analysts across the country, most said they had not heard of ViCAP, or had seen little benefit from using it. Among sex-crimes detectives, none reported having been rewarded with a result from the system. “I’m not sending stuff off to ViCAP because I don’t even know what that is,” said Sgt. Peter Mahuna of the Portland, Oregon, Police Department. “I have never used ViCAP,” said Sgt. Elizabeth Donegan of Austin, Texas. “We’re not trained on it. I don’t know what it entails or whether it would be useful for us.”
Even Joanne Archambault, the director of the police training organization who sees the potential of ViCAP, didn’t use it when she ran the sex-crimes unit at the San Diego Police Department: “In all the years I worked these crimes, we never submitted information to ViCAP,” she said. “As a sex-crime supervisor, we invested time in effort that had a payout.”
Local authorities’ skepticism is reflected in the FBI’s statistics. In 2013, police submitted 240 cases involving sexual assault to the system. The FBI recorded 79,770 forcible rapes that year. Local agencies entered information on 232 homicides. The FBI recorded 14,196 murders.
“It’s disappointing and embarrassing,” said Greg Cooper, a retired FBI agent who directed the ViCAP unit before becoming the police chief in Provo, Utah. “The FBI has not adequately marketed the program and its services. And local law enforcement has not been committed to participating.”
Not all rapes or murders involved serial offenders, of course. But with ViCAP receiving information on only about 0.5 percent of such violent crimes, it struggles to identify those that do.
“Cops don’t want to do more paperwork,” said Jim Markey, a former Phoenix police detective and now a security consultant. “Anytime you ask for voluntary compliance, it won’t be a priority. It’s not going to happen.”
But at some agencies where ViCAP has been incorporated into policing, commanders have become staunch defenders of its utility. Major J.R. Burton, the commander of special investigations for the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office in Tampa, Florida, said detectives at his agency are mandated to enter information on violent crimes into the database. “I love ViCAP,” said Burton, who served on a board of local law enforcement officials that advises the FBI on the system. “There’s many cases where you don’t have DNA. How do you link them together?”
Burton said he understood the frustration that other police experience when they get no results back from the system. When pressed, Burton could not cite any investigations in his jurisdiction that had benefitted from the database. But he said the time and effort to use the system was worth it. “It allows you to communicate across the nation, whether serial homicide or serial rapist,” Burton said. “That’s awesome in my book.”
FBI officials said they had taken steps to address complaints. In July 2008, the program made the database accessible via the Web. Police can now enter their own searches, without having to rely on an FBI analyst, through any computer with an Internet connection. The program has also whittled down the number of questions. Graham says he tells police that it should take only about 30 minutes to enter the details of a case. “I tell them if they can fill out their taxes, they can fill out the ViCAP form,” Graham said.
In November 1980, children began vanishing across Canada.
Christine Weller, 12, was found dead by a river in British Columbia. A year later, Daryn Johnsrude, 16, was found bludgeoned to death. In July 1981, six children were killed in a month, ages six to 18. They were found strangled and beaten to death.
The killer: Clifford Olson, a career criminal, who eluded capture in part because the different jurisdictions where he committed his crimes had never communicated.
The murders prompted Canadian police officials to create a system to track and identify serial killers. After an initial effort failed, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police sent investigators to study the ViCAP program. They returned troubled by some aspects. The FBI system was not being used by many police agencies. Nor did it track sexual assaults. The Mounties decided to improve on the U.S. system by developing their own behavioral crime analysis tool — ViCLAS.
The ViCLAS system has three advantages over its American cousin: people, money and a legal mandate. More than a hundred officers and analysts work for the system, spread across the country. It’s funded at a reported cost of $14 million to $15 million per year. The most important development was that over the years, local legislative bodies passed laws making entry mandatory. All Canadian law enforcement agencies now file reports to the system.
The agency also greatly expanded the list of crimes that can be entered. Any crime that is “behaviorally rich” — usually an incident involving a criminal and a victim — can be entered into the database. It also created stringent quality control. A Canadian analyst who uncovers a link between crimes must submit the findings to a panel for review. Only then can the case be released to local agencies — reducing the chances for bad leads.
Today, Canada’s system has been repeatedly endorsed by senior police officials as an important tool in tracking down killers and rapists. The agency routinely publishes newsletters filled with stories about crimes that the system helped to solve. One study called ViCLAS the “gold standard” of such systems worldwide. The Mounties now license ViCLAS for an annual fee to police forces in Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
The volume of information submitted has made the all the difference, Lawlor said. The system works when enough agencies enter cases to generate results. But agencies are reluctant to enter cases until they see results. “It’s a catch–22 situation,” Lawlor said. “If nothing goes in, then nothing can go out.”
When Burke, ViCAP’s program manager, speaks at national law enforcement conferences, he asks how many people in the audience have heard of his program. Typically only about one-half to two-thirds of the hands go up. A smaller percentage say they actually use it.
“We don’t have a club to force them to sign up with us,” Burke said.
The program’s main goal now is to ensure that the 100 largest police agencies in the country are enrolled. About 80 are. The agency continues to slowly develop its software. Training occurs monthly to encourage more participation.
The FBI doesn’t see the need for major changes to ViCAP, Burke explained. “It’s still supportive,” Burke said. “It’s still viable.”
Ryan Gabrielson contributed to this report.
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom.
