The Da Vinci Code Online

Jerome Collet and Captain Bezu Fache are officers in the DCPJ - Direction Central Police Judiciaire, in Dan Brown’s novel, The Da Vinci Code.

The Direction Centrale Police Judiciaire (DCPJ) is a major French internal security service which acts as the “public face” of the DST (Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire). An essential role of the police is to search for infringements of the law, to observe them, to gather evidence, to identify the authors of crimes, and to apprehend them. Acting thus, the police becomes an ancillary to the judicial authority and takes therefore the designation, “Judicial Police.”

Most of the 7,400 officials of the Judicial Police have the rank of Judicial Police Officer, with either regional or national responsibility. They are able to act on their own initiative or by delegation of authority to magistrates.