During what period of time did organized crime in the united states gain power and become more coordinated?
Answers
Transnational organized crime (TOC) is organized crime coordinated across national borders, involving groups or networks of individuals working in more than one country to plan and execute illegal business ventures.[1] In order to achieve their goals, these criminal groups use systematic violence and corruption. The most commonly seen transnational organized crimes are money laundering; human smuggling; cyber crime; and trafficking of humans, drugs, weapons, kidnapping, people smuggling, endangered species, body parts, or nuclear material.[citation needed]
History Edit
Prior to World War I, several organizations were created to formalize international police cooperation, but most quickly failed, primarily because public police institutions were not sufficiently detached from the political centers of their respective states to function autonomously as expert bureaucracies.[2] In 1914, the First International Criminal Police Congress was held in Monaco, which saw police officers, lawyers and magistrates from 24 countries meeting to discuss arrest procedures, identification techniques, centralized international criminal records and extradition proceedings. This organization appeared poised to avoid the political forces that ended earlier organizations, but the outbreak of World War I disorganized the Congress.[3]
In 1923, a second International Criminal Police Congress was held in Vienna, on the initiative of Mr. Hans Schober, President of the Austrian police. Schober, eager to avoid the politics that doomed previous international police efforts, noted that "ours is not a political but a cultural goal. It only concerns the fight against the common enemy of humankind: the ordinary criminal."[2] This second Congress created the International Criminal Police Commission (ICPC), which served as the direct forerunner of Interpol.[4] Founding members included police officials from Russia, Austria, Germany, Belgium, Poland, China, Egypt, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Romania, Sweden, Switzerland and Yugoslavia.[5] In 1926, the ICPC's General Assembly, held in Berlin, proposed that each country establish a central point of contact within its police structure: the forerunner of the National Central Bureau (NCB).[4] In 1938, the Nazis assumed control of the ICPC and most countries stop participating, effectively causing the ICPC to cease to exist as an international organization.
After World War II, Belgium led the rebuilding of the organization, with a new headquarters in Paris and a new name - Interpol. The United Nations did not recognize Interpol as an intergovernmental organization until 1971.[4] On June 17, 1971, President Nixon declared "America's public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive." [6] With this declaration, the United States began the War on Drugs. At the time, the flow of illicit narcotics into its borders was deemed a major risk to the health and safety of Americans, and as a result, enormous resources were spent in the effort to curtail both the supply of and demand for illegal drugs. In the three decades that followed President Nixon's declaration, drug trafficking served as the dominant form of what the United States and many of its allies viewed as transnational organized crime.[7]