INTERPOL 100 years of Connecting police for a safer world: interview with Odd Reidar Humlegård

August 15, 2023

INTERPOL 100 years of Connecting police for a safer world

Interview with Odd Reidar Humlegård
INTERPOL’s Special Representative to the United Nations in New York and Vienna

Whenever you talk about the police, images from all sorts of TV series and movies come to mind. You think about murders, muggings, arrests of all kinds, and you feel more than a little uneasy. The uniform and the overall look definitely have been designed to impress people, and you cannot but wonder if the Special Representative of INTERPOL to the United Nations, Odd Reidar Humlegård, will be like any of the ones we see on the screen. Our fears put aside; we meet a friendly man who receives us warmly. Mr Humlegård devoted quite a bit of his precious time to answering our questions. Before we leave the floor to him, however, let us first point out that Mr Odd Reidar Humlegård has a long and very impressive CV. In brief: he has been the Norwegian National Police Commissioner, a special adviser to the Norwegian Ministry of Justice and now for the last two years he has been based in New York as INTERPOL’s representative to the United Nations. So, now the floor is yours, Mr Humlegård.

Q: Could you please tell us a little about INTERPOL and what you are doing here?

Organizations such as INTERPOL that have observer status at the United Nations have so-called Special Representatives, unlike United Nations member states who refer to their diplomatic presence as the Permanent Mission to the UN have either a Permanent Representative with the rank of ambassador, or ambassadors. So, I am officially a Special Representative.

We have three such representatives. Besides myself there is one in Brussels covering the EU and another one in Nairobi covering the African Union. So, while we are three Special Representatives all together, I’m the only one covering two offices, Vienna and New York.

We have been here in this office since 2004 and have been cooperating with the United Nations for a long time, going back to 1996 and even occasionally before that. The cooperation between the United Nations and INTERPOL has steadily grown closer. It was not so many years ago that we got a separate resolution on this.

INTERPOL’s headquarters is located in Lyon, France, and has about 1,100 employees. In each of the 195 member countries, there are INTERPOL offices called National Central Bureaus, and they are in different locations. Here in the United States, it’s part of the Department of Justice. So, it’s organized very differently from one country to another. The same applies to the way the police are organized.

In many countries, you can have federal police, then a carbinieri, a polizia nationale, polizia de la strada, polizia finanzia, and in addition you have a local police force. So, it can be a conglomerate of organizations.

Here in the USA, there are 18,000 police districts. In fact, there are as many police districts in the United States as there are employees in the Norwegian police. These 18,000 police districts encompass everything from very small sheriff’s offices with three employees to the New York Police District with its 50,000 employees. There are also 30 different federal police organizations such as the FBI, Homeland Security, etc.

INTERPOL is independent of how the police are organized locally. You have an office in each country, a kind of hub, the National Central Bureau. When you include all these, there are many thousands of people working in INTERPOL, but those directly under the Secretary General working in Lyons number about 1,100.

Q: What exactly are you doing in INTERPOL – are you just looking for criminals?

I usually say, when I talk about INTERPOL, that INTERPOL has a lot in common with Coca Cola. Most people in the world have heard of Coca Cola, but very few people know what it is all about. The same goes for INTERPOL. Very few people really know what we do much less understand the essence of it.

There’s a lot of misrepresentation in literature, in crime novels and in films about INTERPOL officers coming in helicopters and arresting people – that’s not what INTERPOL does.

INTERPOL does many things, but it’s always the member states that take the lead. Very often, INTERPOL is involved in coordinating major operations, for example to seize drugs, to carry out border controls, and operations concerning human trafficking and weapons… We work together with the member states. The core, or capital, of INTERPOL is its 19 databases.

Let me first say that INTERPOL was established 100 years ago, in Vienna. This year we will celebrate its 100th anniversary on 7 September. Last year, I was here in New York together with the Norwegian Police Commissioner, Jon Christian Moller, negotiating a United Nations Day to mark the value of international police cooperation. We succeeded, and it will be marked for the first time this year, on 7 September.

INTERPOL was established to manage cross-border police co-operation. The most important thing we do is collect, systematize and share information. Thus, we have 19 databases that are very busy, because they collect everything imaginable: fingerprints, DNA, lost and stolen passports, vehicles, missing persons… Just to give you an idea of the enormous exchange of information and how important this is for international police cooperation, every day there are 20 million searches in these databases, and the response time is 0.5 seconds.

When you cross borders and the customs officers put your passport into a machine, they are in reality checking if you are wanted or, in official terms, if there is a “notice” on you. There are currently some 70,000 of these notices issued now, and customs officers are in reality checking your passport against INTERPOL’s databases.

International police work would not function without INTERPOL. As I said earlier, we have 195 member states, which is two more member states than the United Nations. We have some regional offices, whose main mission is to provide support to countries where the police are struggling with poor capacity, or need more training, either capacity building or technology training.

There is a huge scope to the organization. We have member states ranking at the very top, with well-equipped police forces and cyber expertise, on down to countries with a lesser level of education or that are struggling to keep up to date with capacity, technology and knowledge and need support and help, especially with cyber technology.

And then we have the control centre – a 24-hour service that member states can call at any time and get answers to their questions. It starts off in Singapore, and then it switches over to Lyon headquarters, and then it goes on to Buenos Aires. There is always somebody to answer no matter what time people call. The control centre also coordinates operations, or, in the event of major incidents or accidents, INTERPOL often sends teams to disaster areas. For example, in the 2004 Tsunami, INTERPOL sent a team to help identify the dead bodies.

After looking at the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, we started to work on our own Global Policing Goals (GPGs), which are a kind of response from INTERPOL.

As the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon said in 2015, there will be no long-term development and improvement without security, and there will be no long-term security without development. We developed seven Global Policing Goals (GPGs) to address a range of issues related to crime and security. Endorsed by our member countries in 2017, the Goals were officially launched in 2018. However, we had already started to work on these well before that. I was involved in this project as early as 2016.

Not so long ago, I gave a presentation at the Security Council when Malta held the presidency. They had put on the agenda, “What are the security policy consequences of global warming and sea level rise?” This is of course, relevant for Malta, which is located on an island, but also for many other countries.

Then I referred to Goal 7, “Support environmental security and sustainability”. I spoke about how INTERPOL has several programmes on prevention and combating environmental crime, whether it’s illegal logging in the rain forests, illegal fishing or hunting – all various sorts of environmental crimes.

It’s interesting to see that this Goal 7 touches most of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). You asked me if we in INTERPOL arrest people. I might say, rather, we try to put crime into a larger context.

Take, for example, Goal 3, “Protect vulnerable communities, protect victims of crime from exploitation and revictimization”. There are SDGs about education, health care, food, getting people out of extreme poverty, etc. These are all very important, but if you are a victim of domestic violence, sexual abuse, exploitation, contemporary forms of slavery, human trafficking, you are not leading the kind of life that Agenda 2030 aims to achieve. That’s why it’s very motivating for me to work here. It’s very important for me to talk to diplomats or United Nations employees to get them to reflect on the value of a well-functioning police force under the rule of law, and legal systems with judiciaries that work.

One cannot ignore that many countries struggle with significant degrees of corruption, compounded by a police force that is not competent enough to deal with crime and where corruption is a huge challenge.

Warm blankets and food are basic necessities, but healthcare and safe local communities so that you don’t get raped or kidnapped on the way to school, or killed, are equally very important things.

That’s why I talk about it a lot in the meetings I have with diplomats, and in presentations and lectures I give, whether it’s in the Security Council, the General Assembly, or in various themed meetings.

United Nations Secretary General Gueterres is right on target when he speaks about the importance of this topic. This year we are actively participating in different committees in the revising of the SDGs. In December last year, we organized a meeting here with the INTERPOL Secretary General and representatives from all the regional police organisations such as Europol, Amerpol, Africanpol, Asianpol etc. They were here for two days. On the agenda, one item was how to review and revise these seven global police goals. This is happening in parallel with what is happening with the SDGs. Once again, it is important that we follow-up. For us, it is also a way of cultivating understanding of the necessity of the police and law enforcement institutions. The plan is that this will be presented at the SDG summit, during the high-level weeks, and then it will be presented at INTERPOL’s General Assembly in Vienna at the end of the year.

Q: Q: You talked about crooks sitting in Africa, Asia. What are you doing in the area of cybercrime?

One of our biggest programmes is dealing with cybercrime, and the other one is counterterrorism. These are two pervasive programmes that run around the world in the INTERPOL organization. We have our own Cyber Directorate in Singapore, which is involved in innovation, development and technology protection, and which has many operations up and running. We also work closely with industry, i.e. the major actors within the technology companies.

Q: Q: There’s a lot of talk about artificial intelligence (AI). How does it fit into your work?

We have a directorate in Singapore that works with innovation and technology development. So, we’re keeping an eye on AI, and something called metaverse, that’s going to be dominant for the rising generation. It establishes an artificial world. You can buy a virtual property and invest in the metaverse around the world. We had metaverse as a topic at a meeting in New Delhi last October. We’re following this and working closely with other organizations and think tanks as well as industry, i.e., the technology companies.

Q: I have heard that you will soon be leaving New York and Interpol. What are you going to do next?

I am actually employed by the Ministry of Justice since leaving my position as the Norwegian Police Commissioner. The Ministry seconded me to Interpol. I’ve been here now for two years, and I will be leaving shortly as the Ministry has given me another important assignment. Initially, I was supposed to have stayed here only eight months more, but then one thing led to another…

I’m going to join the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies and work on strengthening expertise in competence and leadership development within the Total Defence Concept. In short, there are two commission reports that will be presented in Norway soon – one is from the Defence Commission headed by Knut Storberget and the other is from the Total Defence Commission, which was appointed by the Government last year and which is very relevant given the new security policy situation in Europe and thus for Norway. The two commission reports will be important in the follow-up of this.

I will be working on it and will see how we can strengthen cooperation with the defence sector, defence capabilities, and the Ministry of Justice’s subordinate agencies – the police, police security services, national security and preparedness. It will be an exciting job..

When leaving Mr Humlegards office in New York, I was reflecting upon the things that he had said. What we take for granted in many places is not the reality in other parts of the world, and my impression about the police has definitely changed. We wish Mr Humlegard all the best of luck in his new endeavours..