The Federal Judicial Police are under the authority of their General Director, who is helped by a policy support department in charge of dealing with strategic planning and follow-up issues, the management of means and staff, the management of judicial information and international cooperation.

The Federal Judicial Police are subdivided into 27 decentralized directorates and 6 central directorates which carry out their missions by interacting permanently and constructively.

The decentralised judicial directorates	The central directorates	The District Information Crossroads

Harmonisation of the two levels

The harmonisation of the two levels is optimised with the help of a strategic planning process which provides the hierarchy with an overview of the resources used and the goals to achieve.

This process also makes it possible to formulate realistic expectations towards the directorates and to “protect” (central or decentralised) directorates or services from an overload of structural requests.

This in turn makes it possible to practically implement the National Security Plan, which is the concrete realisation of the federal authorities’ policy for a 4-year period.

In practice, this method ensures the effectiveness and efficiency of the police’s approach to priority forms of crime at central and decentralised level. So the central directorates are responsible (among other things) for providing a general description of these forms of crime at national level and for developing, coordinating and supporting the policing aspects of the integral and integrated approach.

Thanks to the autonomy which the decentralised level enjoys, the Judicial Director’s services are supposed to devote their time and energies to the “right form of crime”. One of the ways of doing this is to conduct investigations which take local priorities into account, i.e. the priorities which have been established by the public prosecutor, and to share tasks with the Local Police.

Internal work reports

The relation between the Director General and the directors is of hierarchical nature but the relation between the directors at central and decentralised level is supposed to be complementary, lateral and collegial. The two levels constantly have to take up the challenge of proving support to one another by accomplishing their missions in an effective way.

The directors have been granted specific “in-house” powers in a number of fields which they have the right to exercise freely (for example, making use of the investigation capacity within the Federal Judicial Police in order to perform the judicial authorities’ missions. ). However, they usually need each other to accomplish their missions.

Direction of investigations and preliminary investigations

Investigations and preliminary investigations are directed by the competent judicial authorities, i.e. the federal public prosecutor’s department, the public prosecutor and the examining magistrate.
The magistrates direct the investigator’s missions by way of requisitions.

The authority of the Director General or of a director cannot interfere in the course of an investigation or preliminary investigation within a District Judicial Service or within a central directorate. The role of those directors consists exclusively in coordinating, controlling and providing assistance in the accomplishment of missions.