Ronald Kenneth Noble (born 1956, at Fort Dix, New Jersey) is an American law enforcement officer, and the current Secretary General of INTERPOL.
He is a 1979 graduate of the University of New Hampshire's Whittemore School of Business and Economics with a bachelor's degree in economics and business administration and a 1982 graduate of Stanford Law School. Mr. Noble also is a tenured professor at the New York University School of Law, on leave of absence while serving at INTERPOL.
From 1993 until 1996 he was the Undersecretary for Enforcement of the United States Department of the Treasury, where he was in charge of the United States Secret Service, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, the Office of Foreign Assets Control, and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.[1] He was head of the Department's "Waco Administrative Review Team" which produced a report on the ATF's actions against the Branch Davidians leading to the Waco Siege.[2]
He was elected the first American Secretary General by the 69th INTERPOL General Assembly in Rhodes, Greece, in 2000, was unanimously re-elected to a second five-year term by the 74th INTERPOL General Assembly in Berlin, Germany, in 2005 and was unanimously re-elected to a third five-year term by the 79th INTERPOL General Assembly in Doha, Qatar, in 2010. INTERPOL is the largest international police organization serving 188 countries with a current budget of $72.2 million for 2008.[3]
During his September 20, 2005 acceptance speech in Berlin, the re-elected Secretary General stated:
Less than one year after my confirmation, Al Qaeda terrorists used US soil and US targets to murder thousands of U.S. citizens and citizens from more than 70 of our member countries spread around the globe. On September 11, 2001, the entire world’s attention was finally drawn to the importance of the anti-terrorism fight. On that day, we as a world community were put on notice by Al Qaeda that our personal and national security could never again be taken for granted. It does not matter where you were. It does not matter what you were doing. Each and every one of you can remember where you were when you first learned about or first saw images of the terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Center on the 11th of September 2001. For INTERPOL, the 11th of September was a moment of reckoning. It was the time for us to decide what kind of international police organization we wanted INTERPOL to be. Although INTERPOL had been created over 80 years ago by police chiefs to provide operational police support internationally, something had happened to INTERPOL over the years. INTERPOL had become so slow, so unresponsive that in many police circles around the world INTERPOL was considered irrelevant to their day-to-day needs. But, it was on September 11, 2001 that INTERPOL went operational and that we committed ourselves to working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year to support our NCBs and police services. And it was on that day that we first began reaching out to you in times of crisis, rather than waiting for you to ask for help. One can say that INTERPOL was reborn on the 11th of September 2001.[4]
Under Secretary General Noble's leadership, INTERPOL developed the world's first global database of stolen or lost travel documents (i.e., passports) from more than 120 countries and the first global police communications system, called I-24/7 as part of its international screening process for terrorists and dangerous criminals.
He created the world's first international automated DNA database and another automated database aimed at fighting the sexual exploitation of children on the Internet. During his 2000-2007 tenure, nearly 22,000 wanted international criminals were arrested, he directed the opening of a new INTERPOL office at the United Nations in 2004 and another office at the European Union in Brussels, increased the nationalities of their staff from 52 to 80; created a bioterrorism prevention unit at the General Secretariat in Lyon and planned the formation of the first International Anti-Corruption Academy in Vienna, Austria.
In 2008, he was awarded the Légion d'honneur by French President Nicolas Sarkozy.[5]
Mr. Noble also speaks French, German, and Spanish, as well as his native English.