Police forces the world over also are being transformed by the global war against the international flow of illegal drugs, illegal immigration, cyber crime, and international terrorism.

But neither the globalization of the economy nor the notion of worldwide cooperation in police work are actually new, according to Mathieu Deflem, an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology.

His recent book, Policing World Society (Oxford University Press, 2002; paperback 2004), documents the rise of international police cooperation since the middle of the 19th century, and, he said, the effects of economic globalization have actually been around since the low degree of dispersal that came with the formation of the first empires.

Deflem’s National Science Foundation-funded research in the globalization of socio-legal phenomena and the history of international policing was followed by research applying insights from his historical work to police strategies in counter-terrorism.
The work has been partially funded by a faculty grant from the Walker Institute of International Studies at USC. Deflem also edited a new book, Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism: Criminological Perspectives (Elsevier Science, 2004), in which he collected criminologists’ contributions in the study of counter-terrorism.

His historical research was once thought by colleagues to be “interesting, but kind of quaint,” Deflem said.

But since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he has been spotlighted as an oft-quoted authority on the role of multi-national police organizations in countering terrorism. His work was featured in a May 8, 2003 CNN debate about the United Nations’ response to terrorism and he has been called on as a source for numerous news stories about terrorist threats at home and abroad.

“It’s like my work went from merely interesting to highly relevant in just one day,” said Deflem, a native of Belgium who joined the USC Department of Sociology in 2002 after receiving his Ph.D. at the University of Colorado and teaching at Kenyon College and Purdue University. He received his undergraduate education at the Katholieke Universiteit te Leuven in Belgium and his master’s degree from the University of Hull in England.

The first European international police organization was the Police Union of German States that operated between Austria and other sovereign German language countries from 1851 to 1866 to combat the political threat of socialist and communist groups fomenting rebellion, Deflem said.

That cooperation fell apart when war broke out between Prussia and Austria. But the realization among police officials that international collaboration among authorities could be effective in fighting crime led to the formation in 1923 of the International Criminal Police Organization, which was abbreviated for telegraph communications to Interpol.

Though that organization was taken over by the Nazis during World War II, it re-emerged after the war as a cooperative worldwide network of existing police agencies headquartered in Lyon, France. Today, it has member agencies from 181 nations who rely on the cooperative organization solely for the exchange of information among police. Interpol is not a supra-national police agency and has no enforcement officers or agents.

The second true international organization of police agencies forging cooperation among European countries was formed in the 1990s when the European Union created the European Police Office, or Europol, headquartered at The Hague in Holland. It has an agreement with Interpol to fight terrorism as well as accords with other police agencies.

The attacks of 9/11 were not the first event that propelled cooperative international police work, particularly in Europe, where terrorist incidents in the early 1970s spawned the TREVI Treaty of 1975 among European Community states for cooperation and co-ordination among their police forces. The cooperation accelerated in the 1980s with concerns about terrorism hitting the United States, and increased in the late 1990s when the threat of terrorism from loosely connected networks surrounding Osama bin Laden were clearly identified, Deflem said.

Can a global police force defeat terrorism? Probably not by itself, said Deflem, who argues that an effective response to terrorism will require more than just international cooperation by police agencies, and more than uni-lateral or even multi-lateral military intervention.

“Terrorism is a multi-dimensional problem that is not solely the act of a particular person or group committing particular crimes, but also has certain political and cultural dimensions that are part of a culture of terrorism that has been embraced or tolerated by some countries,” Deflem said.

He believes a more multi-dimensional and integrated intervention at a variety of levels is called for, including criminal law enforcement and cultural programs to effectively confront terrorism. “I’m not arguing for less intervention,” he said, “but for more, and in a more comprehensive way.”

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