Competition: The Historical Conflict within Police Work Cooperation among the police has not always been as straightforward as might be thought. In policing, cooperation appears to be a learned behavior conditioned by many factors, among which are the historical traditions and rivalries of police agencies and their officers. The history of cooperation between police agencies, either within or across countries, has been complicated by many factors as well. For example, when the Stadtguardia and the Military Police had to work together in Vienna in the beginning of the fifteenth century, overt conflict often existed between the two forces, which hindered the development of cooperative arrangements. It seemed that the only way to gain cooperation was to eliminate one of the protagonists. Ultimately the emperor of Austria had to abolish the Stadtguardia altogether, favoring the Military Police as the preferred state institution for providing security in cities and towns throughout Austria. Such historical examples of police agency conflict can be found in practically every modern country in the world, and they persist to this day.
Competition among police agencies continues to be a regular part of police work, in part because agencies are evaluated on the strength of their own and not others’ accomplishments. Such competition highlights the need for continued development of these agencies within their own countries, as well as highlighting the necessity of an expanded framework in order for there to be international police cooperation.
This expanded framework of cooperation is becoming increasingly more important today as the new age of crime becomes more and more international, especially in regard to the phenomena of international terrorism, organized crime, and drug trafficking. The internationalization of crime and of the consequences of crime focus the question of how police agencies worldwide will cooperate, not compete. This is the subject of this article.
INTERPOL
In April 1914, Prince Albert I of Monaco convened an international conference of police and other criminal justice officials. At this meeting, the members formulated the preliminary design for an international police organization and resolved to meet again in two years to implement this design. Two months later, on June 28, 1914, a twenty-one-year-old Serbian, Gavrilo Prinzip, who was watching a military procession in Sarajevo, fired three shots from a Browning pistol, killing Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife (Fooner 1989, 8). This event ignited World War I. Five years after the end of World War I, in September 1923, INTERPOL, or the International Criminal Police Commission (the name of which was changed later to International Criminal Police Organization), came into existence.
Dr. Johann Schober, the head, or police president, of Vienna’s police service, played a key role in assembling the conference that culminated in the establishment of INTERPOL. Schober not only served as police president but also acted as Austria’s chancellor from 1921 to 1922. Schober and his colleagues performed what has to be rated as an astonishing feat: Within five days, they put together a functional international organization, a permanent body with a constitution, officers, a headquarters, and operational procedures. Police chiefs from twenty countries met in Vienna, without authority or instructions from their governments, and formed the organization that today bears the name INTERPOL. Article 2 of INTERPOL’s Constitution establishes the organization’s aims as follows:
To ensure and promote the widest possible mutual assistance between all criminal police authorities within the limits of the laws existing in the different countries and in the spirit of the ”Universal Declaration of Human Rights”; and To establish and develop all institutions likely to contribute effectively To the prevention and suppression of ordinary law crimes. (INTERPOL Constitution and General Regulations, http://www.interpol.int)
In the 1920s and 1930s, INTERPOL refined its multinational police cooperation system at a time when counterfeiting was a major international crime problem. During the mid-1980s, INTERPOL adapted its multinational cooperation system to address international terrorism. In recent decades, international terrorists have taken in the whole world as their field of operation, whereas police and law enforcement systems belong to particular nations and thus are confined within the borders of their respective countries.
INTERPOL was founded and developed for the pragmatic purposes of stopping international criminals and preventing international crimes. To accomplish these tasks, INTERPOL seeks to improve international police cooperation. This requires INTERPOL to remain politically neutral; in fact, its constitution requires that before INTERPOL can become involved in an investigation or provide information there must be overlapping interest in the crime(s) among member countries. INTERPOL also does not focus on ”political crime” so as to maintain its respect for member state sovereignty. Today its work is focused on terrorism, organized crime, trafficking in humans, drugs, or weapons, money laundering, and high-tech crime.
With its 184 member countries, INTERPOL is now the world’s second largest international organization, following the United Nations. It is financed by annual contributions from its member countries and is headquartered in Lyon, France.
International Police Intelligence
Police work has changed from reactive to proactive measures. However, as a German prosecutor once said, ”Criminals are using jets, the police use cars, and the Justice [System] uses horses.” Such rapid change in the nature of crime and the resulting worldwide response require not only international police and justice system cooperation, but also improvements in the methods of crime analysis and other police techniques to illuminate and address the problem of international crime. Several recommendations have been issued by governments to act on the basis of this strategy, which emphasizes using intelligence and crime analysis to achieve international criminal investigative aims. Specialized police arrangements as well as investigation and prosecutorial structures have now been created and charged with improving the level and consequences of international crime analysis and the apprehension of international criminals and terrorists. INTERPOL has become a primary vehicle for the police community worldwide to engage in cooperative and more sophisticated approaches to international crime prevention.
