Interpol arrests nobody, and its name began as a telegraph address
Films show Interpol agents kicking down doors, but the organisation is not a police force at all. It is a clearing house linking police in 196 countries through databases and communications networks. Even its famous name started life as a mere telegraphic address, adopted officially only in 1956.
Police cooperation across borders was improvised until the nineteenth century. The first permanent attempt was the Police Union of German States, created in 1851 largely to track political dissidents as well as criminals. Italy tried again with an anti-anarchist conference in Rome in 1898 that drew delegates from 21 European countries, but neither it nor a follow-up in St Petersburg in 1904 achieved anything.
The real founding came on 7 September 1923, when a five-day police congress in Vienna ended by creating the International Criminal Police Commission. It took on much of its modern work during the 1930s. Then came a dark chapter: after Germany annexed Austria in 1938 the Nazis took control, and the commission's headquarters eventually ended up in the Berlin building that housed the Gestapo. It did little until the war ended. A new constitution in 1956 brought the current name, borrowed from the telegraph code used since 1946.
Today the headquarters is in Lyon, France, with seven regional bureaus and a national central bureau in every member state. The priorities are terrorism, cybercrime and organised crime, though the remit stretches to drug trafficking, corruption, intellectual property theft and white-collar fraud. Its tools are shared databases, crime information centres, training and expert support for national forces.
The annual budget is about 142 million euros, mostly paid by member police forces. Every member sits in the General Assembly, which chooses an executive committee and a president, at present the Frenchman Lucas Philippe, while a General Secretariat of roughly 1,000 police and civilian staff, led by Valdecy Urquiza, runs daily operations. The charter demands political neutrality, forbidding any involvement in political, military, religious or racial matters, and the organisation works in Arabic, English, French and Spanish.
Source: Interpol
