International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL)

• International Criminal Police Organization is an inter-governmental organization with 195 member countries.
• This facilitates worldwide police cooperation and crime control.
• Headquartered in Lyon, France, it is the world’s largest international police organization, with seven regional bureaus worldwide and a National Central Bureau.
• It was founded in September 1923 as the International Criminal Police Commission (ICPC), adopting many of its current duties throughout the 1930s.
• After coming under Nazi control in 1938, the agency was effectively moribund until the end of World War II.
• In 1956, the ICPC adopted a new constitution and the name Interpol, derived from its telegraphic address used since 1946.
• Interpol was at first mainly a European organization, drawing only limited support from the United States and other non-European countries (the United States did not join the ICPC until 1938).

Functions

• Interpol provides investigative support, expertise, and training to law enforcement worldwide, focusing on three major areas of transnational crime: terrorism, cybercrime, and organized crime.
• Its broad mandate covers virtually every kind of crime, including crimes against humanity, child pornography, drug trafficking and production, political corruption, intellectual property infringement, and white-collar crime.
• Interpol’s collaborative form of cooperation is useful when fighting international crime because language, cultural, and bureaucratic differences can make it difficult for police officials from different nations to work together.
• Interpol’s databases at the Lyon headquarters can assist law enforcement in fighting international crime.
• Interpol aims to promote the widest-possible mutual assistance between criminal police forces and to establish and develop institutions likely to contribute to the prevention and suppression of international crime.