The Police Force With No Arrest Powers
Movies and TV often show Interpol as a squad of global cops. In reality, Interpol is not a law enforcement agency at all, and it has no agents with the power to arrest anyone. It is a network that links the police forces of different countries so they can share information and help each other.
It is still the largest international police organization in the world. Its headquarters sit in Lyon, France. Each of its 196 member countries runs a National Central Bureau, and there are seven regional bureaus around the globe. Around 1,000 staff from over 100 countries keep the daily work going, a mix of police officers and civilians.
The group works in four languages: Arabic, English, French and Spanish. Its yearly budget is about 142 million euros. Most of that money comes from member countries, and part of it arrives as equipment, services and buildings instead of cash.
Twelve Ideas From Monaco
For most of history, police in different countries only teamed up for one case at a time. Then growing travel and trade made it easier for criminals to slip across borders. In 1914, Monaco hosted a big meeting of officials from two dozen countries. They wrote down twelve principles, such as letting police forces talk to each other directly, setting shared standards for forensics, and making extradition requests simpler.
The First World War put the idea on hold. In 1923, a new congress in Vienna finally made it real. Its 22 delegates founded the International Criminal Police Commission, the direct ancestor of Interpol. That same year, it began publishing notices about wanted people in its own journal.
The group grew fast. The United Kingdom joined in 1928, and by 1934 there were 58 member nations. The United States only joined in 1938, although an American police officer had unofficially attended the 1923 meeting.
A Name Borrowed From a Telegram
The young organization hit a dark patch. After Germany took over Austria in 1938, the Vienna-based group fell under Nazi control, and its headquarters later moved to Berlin. Most member countries walked away, and it stayed mostly inactive until the Second World War ended.
In 1946, officials from Belgium, France, Scandinavia, the United States and the United Kingdom brought it back to life. Its new home was Paris. In 1967 it moved to the nearby suburb of Saint-Cloud, and in 1989 it settled in Lyon. In 1956, it adopted a new constitution and an official new name: Interpol. That catchy word came from the telegraphic address it had used since 1946.
Its symbols date from 1950. The emblem shows a globe for worldwide work, olive branches for peace, a sword for police action and scales for justice. The flag adds lightning bolts, which stand for fast communication and police work.
Seven Colours of Notices
Interpol's best known tool is its system of notices. There are eight types. Seven of them are named by colour: red, blue, green, yellow, black, orange and purple. The eighth is a special notice issued at the request of the United Nations Security Council. In 2019 there were 62,448 valid Red notices and 12,234 Yellow notices in circulation.
Behind the notices sit huge databases in Lyon. They hold fingerprints, face photos, lists of wanted people, DNA samples and travel documents. The database of lost and stolen travel documents alone holds more than 12 million records. That matters because a country's own police files rarely reach past its borders.
All of this flows through an encrypted network called I-24/7, which lets member countries reach each other at any hour. Some countries have extended it to airports and border crossings, so officers can check records right where people arrive.
Crisis Teams and Cyber Labs
When a major disaster or attack strikes, Interpol can send an Incident Response Team. These teams help identify victims and suspects and pass information to police in other countries. If local authorities ask, they can even run the central command for a case. Such teams were sent out eight times in 2013. Since 2009, Interpol has also issued its own travel documents, hoping countries would drop visa rules for people on Interpol business so help could arrive faster.
Its Command and Coordination Centres answer urgent calls around the clock. The first is in Lyon, a second opened in Buenos Aires in 2011, and a third in Singapore in 2014.
Singapore is also home to a research hub for digital crime that opened in April 2015. Before the ribbon was even cut, its team had already coordinated a worldwide takedown of a botnet called SIMDA. Through all of this, Interpol's constitution strictly forbids it from taking part in political or military matters, among a few other kinds.
