UT Dallas study finds Interpol's war on terrorism delivers ‘big payback’

In the wake of 9/11, Interpol, the International Criminal Police Organization, shifted resources to fighting terrorism, and its effort is “paying off in a big way,” according to University of Texas at Dallas researcher Dr. Todd Sandler.

"According to calculations, Interpol gets $200 in gain for every $1 it spends on the fight against terrorism," said Sandler, the Vibhooti Shukla professor of economics and political economy in UT Dallas' School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences. "That's a big payback."

The study was written jointly with Dr. Daniel Arce, professor of economics at UT Dallas, and Dr. Walter Enders, professor of economics at the University of Alabama, and is scheduled to be published in the Journal of Law and Economics in February 2011.

The project looked at anti-terrorism activities within Interpol and used the agency's records and data to determine how much money had been devoted to terrorism projects and how successful such efforts were.

Interpol's budgets for anti-terrorist efforts in 2006 and 2007 were $14 million and $17 million, respectively, the researchers found.

Therefore, “if the average cost of a terrorist act is $5 million, then the agency needed to prevent only four acts during 2007 to more than pay back the budget cost,” according to a UT Dallas statement. “Arrests that occurred in cooperation with Interpol far exceeded that number, though the data doesn't reveal whether any of those arrests would have been made without Interpol's cooperation.”

The research was funded by grants from DHS and was not paid for by Interpol, the statement notes.

"Our findings, taken together, could say a lot to members of Congress as they consider how they should allocate funds for fighting terrorism," Sandler said in the statement.

"Quite simply, Interpol presents large paybacks on small expenditures as it addresses the shortfall of collective proactive measures," the authors write in their upcoming study. "This is a smart way to fight transnational terrorism."