Love them or hate them, police are an integral part of our current set-up worldwide. With our global community ever shrinking and master-mind villains expanding their secret underground networks internationally it only makes sense that we have a superhero international policing agency. Interpol was born to fill just such a void.

The concept of an international policing organisation was floated in April 1914, at the First International Congress of Judicial Police in Monaco. At the time, the pre-eminent French criminologist Henri Donnedieu de Vabres wrote that criminals were increasingly able to evade capture by simply leaving the country. The problem was worsening, due to “the progress of automobilism, even aviation”. A global solution was needed: “The internationalism of crime should be opposed by the internationalism of repression”.

The First World War forced the idea to be put on hold. But in 1923, at the Second Judicial Police Congress, the International Criminal Police Commission (ICPC) – a forerunner of Interpol – was set up in Vienna. According to its founding statutes, it operated “to the strict exclusion of all matters having a political, religious or racial character”. It had no legal authority over member states, and existed merely to collect and catalogue intelligence, and coordinate communication between different international police forces.

To this day, Interpol adheres to these principles. Contrary to popular perception, the organisation does not have its own prisons or carry out arrests. Instead it acts behind the scenes, collating masses of intelligence and coordinating police efforts internationally. It also refuses to get involved in cases of a political nature (such as that of Julian Assange). [The Telegraph]

Although Interpol has recently come under fire for getting caught up in messy political arrests, at their core their ethos seems fairly necessary and they have had some huge successes in catching some notorious and nasty people. For more on this click here. Politics are everywhere, it would be naive to think that even an apolitical organisation wouldn’t occasionally be caught in the crossfire.

[Source] The Telegraph