Law enforcement training and learning: a comprehensive “capacity building” approach

Abstract

"Building an International Learning Community", the ambitious idea of the 16th Interpol Training Symposium (Johannesburg, 2007), has become over time a shared philosophy and a common strategy in the Police Community. Accordingly, the Oslo Dialogue, launched by the OECD in March 2011 and aiming at preventing, detecting and prosecuting criminal activities as well as at recovering the connected proceeds, pointed out the need of a capacity building approach. This should involve an interdisciplinary common strategy to improve and share expertise and best practices in the field of financial investigation and asset recovery.
Within this framework, and in deference to the EU “lifelong learning policy”, Italy’s Guardia di Finanza (G. di F.) proposed the EU Commission and subsequently implemented (2013-2015) on its behalf the “Economic and Financial Investigator Project” (EFI), advocating financial investigation as the pivotal investigative technique that all EU Member countries should adopt. The underlying idea of this initiatives is to re-focus police training on the attending officers’ capacity of acquiring and implementing a common know how in order to meet the growing challenges of transnational crime.
In addition, in 2014, the OECD entrusted the G. di F. Tax Police School with the set-up of the International Academy for Tax Crime Investigation. Meanwhile, the School managed various CEPOL courses, supporting the participants with a proprietary e-learning platform. Moving from this in-field experience, this paper highlights the most recent trends in the field of law enforcement training and education: a comprehensive "capacity building" approach; the improvement of the effectiveness of the organizational and cultural climate in education through the management of diversity; the rising role of the financial investigation in countering global crime.