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Mr. Rob Anderson - Parliamentary Assistant to the Solicitor, General and Minister of Public Security, Alberta;

Deputy Commissioner Rod Knecht of the RCMP, (K Division);

Chief Mike Boyd – President, Alberta Association of Chiefs of Police (AACP);

Members of the Canadian Association of Police Educators;

Heads of Police Trainings;

Other conference participants;

Colleagues from the INTERPOL General Secretariat;

Ladies and Gentlemen;

Good morning,

In my eight years as Secretary General of INTERPOL, I have visited 127 of our 187 member countries. As is the case with all official travels, I can generally only manage to spend merely a day or two in these countries. This makes my visit here in Canada particularly special – I’ll have the luxury of spending four days here, in this country that has always been not only a welcoming home to me, but, more importantly, a staunch and valuable partner with INTERPOL for sixty years.

Of course, I will have been remiss if I fail to mention the two real reasons why I consider this lengthy sojourn in Canada truly special. It is fitting that both of these deal with the building of partnerships.

Last Friday, I joined our Canadian colleagues from the Ministry of Public Safety, the RCMP, the Canada Border Service Agency and the INTERPOL National Central Bureau in Ottawa and its director Bob Resch to participate in the official launch of the INTERPOL-Canadian Police Information Centre Interface. This Interface will allow all of Canada’s 66,000 law enforcement officers to conduct real-time inquiries in INTERPOL’s global databases, containing information on stolen passports, fingerprints, DNA, fugitives wanted around the world, and much more.

It was indeed a momentous occasion, not only for the Canadian law enforcement community but also for the entire INTERPOL community worldwide. The more we partner to share information across borders, the more effective every single component of law enforcement will be.

Today, I speak about a different sort of partnership – one with the Canadian Association of Police Educators (CAPE) that has resulted in making this 17th INTERPOL Training Symposium possible here in the beautiful city of Edmonton, Canada.

I know that education plays a vital role in all of our lives. For me, this meant dedicating an important part of my professional life to teaching as a fully tenured professor at the New York University School of Law – indeed, this year will be my twentieth anniversary at NYU. I have retained this teaching post while serving as Secretary General, and for the third year in a row, I will teach a class this summer on International Police Enforcement Co-operation.

But just as I have dedicated myself to teaching, I am also very aware of the importance of learning. This 17th Training Symposium is a perfect forum in which to exhibit this.

You, the 200 participants, bringing together the perspectives of 35 countries, will have the opportunity to hear from experts from four continents share their knowledge on such diverse topics as training governance, academic/police collaboration, capacity building, and competency-based curriculum. Outside of the sessions, you will interact, exchange and compare experiences – and from this exposure to the practices and values of dozens of other countries, you will gain immeasurably.

Today, I am honored to be among so many of you who have dedicated your lives to police training, honored to be able to participate as a learner and to gain – like all of you – from this forum of discussion and exchange.

We in the law enforcement community are today constantly faced with security challenges that transcend national borders and jurisdictions. We have all witnessed crimes committed in one country, organized and planned in another country by a crime group based on a third country. The complexities of organized crime today compel us to re-adjust our traditional crime fighting strategies and force us to look globally while responding locally. Whether we are confronting piracy in Somalia or pursuing international jewel robbers such as the Pink Panther Group, we have to think and act beyond national and international boundaries to be more effective – indeed, to be effective at all! We cannot afford to be isolated from what is happening in the other parts of the world.

Today, there is an urgent need for all of us to collectively find and adopt new ideas on how we can train our police officers to work internationally on a bilateral, multilateral and global basis.

Today’s police officers need to be equipped and trained not only with the basic crime investigation skills but also with the right knowledge and technology that allow them to connect and share critical police information and best practices with their foreign counterparts. Simply stated, modern law enforcers need to have a strong understanding and appreciation of effective international police co-operation.

As I look out upon this audience, I know I am preaching to the choir. You know – you have known for years – how absolutely vital a role police training plays.

I’m pleased to tell you that INTERPOL recognizes this too: in 2007, we designated Police Training and Development as the 4th core function of INTERPOL. This designation will enable us to help enhance the capacity of member countries through the sharing of knowledge, skills and best practices in policing and the establishment of global standards for combating specific crimes.

In line with this new core function, we established the INTERPOL Police Training and Development Directorate, and we canvassed the world to find the right person to lead it, one of the most committed, experienced, and hard-working police trainers right here in Canada. You all know him; he is one of your own – Mr. Dale Sheehan, former President of the Canadian Association of Police Educators (CAPE). Dale now serves as our focal point in providing focused police training initiatives for national police forces, on-demand advice, and guidance and support in building dedicated crime-fighting components. 

Even before Dale’s arrival, INTERPOL was strongly committed to providing training and capacity building.  For the past two years, more than 4,500 officers from 169 countries have benefitted from these various INTERPOL training programmes, including the INTERPOL International Police Training Programme (IIPTP), offered in the English and French languages to over 75 participants from 89 countries. In the very near future, we will offer this program in Spanish for the benefit of our Spanish-speaking member countries.

We have also engaged future policy and decision makers of national police organizations and offered them a global and unique training programme that covers the policing challenges of the 21st century. Within the framework of OASIS Africa, INTERPOL has just completed the 1st Executive Police Development Programme (EPDP) attended by senior management-level police officers from 17 African countries.

But by making training one of our core functions, and by bringing an expert like Dale to Lyon, the quality of our training has already paid dividends. I’ll quote one program participant, a senior Police Director from South Africa, who described the program as “a clear demonstration of INTERPOL’s commitment, together with the German government, to enhance and empower Africa in addressing the challenges of contemporary policing, especially transnational crime”.

The past two years have already seen us doing a great deal to live up to this fourth core function. We signed a co-operative agreement with the University of Dublin (Ireland) for cybercrime trainings. We have maintained our strong partnership with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimes (UNODC) and the Austrian Government, which led to the establishment of the first International Anti-Corruption Academy in Vienna. We are closely collaborating with the UNDPKO to raise awareness of the growing importance of the role of law enforcement in peacekeeping, particularly in upholding the rule of law in conflict areas. Finally, we will discuss police training and development for peacekeeping operations during the INTERPOL General Assembly in Singapore later this year.

What I must impress upon you all, is that we need your help, your commitment, and most importantly, your partnership. With your support, we can do so much more.

Through committed partnerships, we can harness each other’s strengths and learn from each other as we take up our shared fight against crime. Co-operation permits us to draw on each others expertise and experience on a more regular basis, resulting in increased resources and well-rounded approaches in police training. It creates a synergy that propels us to achieve a much higher standard of training and co-operation for our police officers.

Among the proposed initiatives that rest upon our co-operation is the development and support of a global learning community for our police forces. This will allow the systematic exchange of best practices and experience, avoid unnecessary duplication, and enable a much more diverse audience to be reached – and, most importantly, it will offer the cost effectiveness we particularly need in these times of global financial crisis.

Establishing a global learning community will allow the growth of a long-lasting a meaningful partnership, one that will not be restricted to biannual conferences, to our geographic locations, or to our respective law enforcement or academic institutions. 

I point in particular to one initiative from INTERPOL’s side that we hope will be paradigmatic for this developing global partnership. This initiative, the INTERPOL Global Learning Centre (IGLC), will provide an electronic platform that allows the sharing of knowledge, expertise, best practices and training (including e-learning) between member countries, well beyond the NCBs. It will be available in the four official languages of INTERPOL – English, French, Spanish, and Arabic.

This Global Learning Centre cannot succeed solely through INTERPOL’s efforts. It requires input and support from you – all of you.

We are hoping to glean this input through in-residence fellowships at INTERPOL, through which some of you can spend three to six months at INTERPOL headquarters or in our Regional Bureaus. At INTERPOL, you will be designing training courses, mentoring future trainers, and teaching those whom we so badly need to teach.

There is no reason why in-residence fellowships cannot be created – through co-operation with INTERPOL and your own institutions. I encourage you to recognize that our only limitations are our creativity and our commitment.

Dear Colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen,

There is an old Chinese proverb that says “if you give a man a fish he eats for a day; if you teach him to fish, he eats for a lifetime”. This is what we hope to achieve with our training programme and why this programme is so vital to the reality we face today. We do not know who or how or when one of your police officers will be called upon to contribute to major international investigations, but it is our collective goal to ensure that every single member of the police forces in all 187 member countries will be able to rise to this challenge.

INTERPOL and its 187 member countries law enforcement entities need you.  We know that in partnership with you individually and collectively we can identify innovative ways to bring knowledge to our police officers whenever and wherever they are.  In doing so, we will help build safer and more secure communities worldwide which will lead to greater development and prosperity.

May this Training Symposium be the start of a collaboration among trainers and INTERPOL that will make all of us better at what we do.  Let it foster greater international networks of trainers and generate the highest quality training materials for all to use.  Let this conference be a reminder of what is possible when smart, experienced, hardworking, and innovative people commit themselves to sharing what they have learned and know for the benefit of all.

Finally, let this conference be an important step forward in achieving a truly global learning community for our police forces.

Thank you.