At the time of this interview, Carlos Humberto Vargas García was the chief of studies at the National Academy of Public Security in El Salvador, an institution separate from the national police. From 1992 to 1995, he was the first sub-director of the academy, and he trained in the U.S. and Central America with ICITAP, the International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program. He also worked in the private sector, in other universities in El Salvador as a professor of engineering, and for the Instituto Salvadoreño de Formación Profesional, which is in charge of non-formal education.

At the time of this interview, Giorgio Butini was police adviser to the Office of the EUSR/ EU Commission Delegation in Skopje, Macedonia. A lieutenant colonel of the Italian State Police with 18 years of active service, in 2001 he joined the United Nations mission in Kosovo, where he served for more than a year as deputy regional commander in the Pec/Peja Region.  In 2003 he went to Brussels as a police expert during the Italian presidency of the European Union.  In October 2003 he was part of the planning team in Brussels and Skopje that launched Proxima,  the EU police mission in the former Yugoslav republic, where he served for two years, first as central coordinator and then as deputy head of program.  Co-author of a manual on international police missions, he was also a trainer at the European Police Academy beginning in 2002.

At the time of this interview, Ranjit Singh Sardara was the chief of operations of the United Nations Police in Manatutu, Timor-Leste. He served in the Royal Malaysian Police for 27 years. His experience spanned community policing, traffic cases, crime prevention, and operations and intelligence. Sardara was also a part of the U.N. mission in Bosnia-Herzegovina. He served as an election officer in Visegrad; he held the post of deputy station commander and later, station commander. Sardara also served as the deputy regional commander of Sarajevo.

Neil Pouliot served as the commander of the military and civilian police components of United Nations Mission in Haiti from 1994 to 1996. In this role, he worked with the government of Haiti to maintain and safe and secure environment, prepare for elections, provide interim security, and oversee police services development. Prior to his work in Haiti, Pouliot worked with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Canada, including as the officer in charge of national/international drug operations. He also served as a course coordinator and lecturer at the Canadian Police College and as a resource person for the U.N. Division of Narcotics and Interpol. Pouliot also served as the officer in charge of the Security Offenses Branch for the Criminal Intelligence Directorate in Ottawa and the director of Criminal Intelligence Services Canada, an organization tasked with coordinating intelligence in Canada and internationally through the RCMP and other police forces. At the time of this interview, Pouliot was retired as chief superintendent and was working as a consultant with RCMP.   

At the time of this interview, Iver Frigaard was the acting police commissioner for the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo, a post to which he was appointed in May 2008 by the U.N.'s Department of Peacekeeping Operations. Educated as a lawyer and with a military background, he became a public prosecutor with the police in Norway. After 11 years in the security services, he spent another 11 years with Interpol in France before joining UNMIK in Kosovo in 2007 as deputy commissioner for crime.

At the time of this interview, Chief Superintendent Dave Beer was serving as the director general of international policing for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, a position that included peace-operations deployments, liaison with INTERPOL, and oversight of the international operations branch, the visits and travel branch, and the international affairs and policy branch.  Beer led or participated in policing development missions under the auspices of the Canadian International Development Agency, the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations and the U.S. State Department.  Although he spent the most time in Haiti, partially due to his being bilingual in French and English, he also served in Liberia, Central African Republic and Iraq.   

At the time of this interview, Faton Hamiti was the administrative assistant in the Office of the Police Commissioner of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo. He initially worked as a journalist in a daily newspaper in Kosovo before the war and then became a language assistant with UNMIK, first with a U.N. Police patrol and later at the police-station level. In 2006 he started working with the deputy police commissioner for operations, and in 2008 he was assigned as personnel/administrative assistant to the police commissioner.

Doug Coates began his involvement in international policing in 1993 as a member of the United Nations advance team to the U.N. Mission to Haiti.  He then served as a regional commander in Haiti’s Grand'Anse region, where he was responsible for the development of policing services, training of the (at that time) interim security force, and maintenance of law and order throughout the region.  From 1996 to 2001, Coates managed the peacekeeping department of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, including the management of a mission in Haiti and the deployment of Canadian police to peacekeeping operations around the world.  He then served as the director of police programs and as chief operating officer to the Pearson Peacekeeping Center, a private, nongovernmental organization based in Ottawa; in that capacity, he was involved in the development and implementation of military police and civilian programming.  At the time of the interview, Coates served as the director of the RCMP’s International Peace Operations program.  His international experience in international policing included Haiti, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu; he also worked on police capacity-building programs in Africa.  Coates died in the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, where he was serving as the acting police commissioner for the U.N. Stabilization Mission.

At the time of this interview, Oliver Janser was the acting deputy director of public safety at the Kosovo mission of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, a post that he had held since January 2008. He previously served for 17 years in the German Federal Police as a counselor. His first mission as a U.N. Police officer was in Kosovo in 2001-02, where he started in the airport and later became the chief of the bicycle unit. He earned a master’s degree in risk/disaster management and peacekeeping, and joined the OSCE in Kosovo in 2002, where he started as an instructor for the tactical unit at the Kosovo Police Service training school, teaching defense tactics.

At the time of this interview, Keith Biddle was a consultant on police reform efforts in Africa and a retired officer of the British police. He became involved in international police reform in 1994 as a member of the British police force, in which capacity he served as deputy assistant commissioner in the Metropolitan Police and later as assistant inspector of the Constabulary in the Home Office. In 1994, he became the policing adviser to South Africa’s Independent Electoral Commission in advance of Nelson Mandela’s election. Following his work in South Africa, Biddle began to work with the U.K. Department for International Development on issues involving police reform, including in Indonesia, Ethiopia, Namibia and South Africa. Between 1999 and 2004, while working with the United Nations under DFID, Biddle headed the police force in Sierra Leone. He subsequently worked on police reform projects in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Somalia, and continued to be involved in police reform efforts in Africa.