Police Museum Research Articles

Between the Social Limbo and the Art Canon

From Luiz Alphonsus’s Rio de Janeiro Police Museum photographic series, this article discusses the complex framing of artifacts used in Brazilian religious communities linked to belief systems in some African regions, which exist between the social limbo and the Brazilian art canon. After briefly reviewing how random sets of objects violently and unsystematically seized by the Police were considered criminal evidence, museum items, or national heritage from the late-nineteenth century to mid-twentieth century, we analyse texts published by Raymundo Nina Rodrigues, Manuel Querino, Mário Barata, and Arthur Ramos, who pioneered the artistic dimension of Afro-Brazilian religious artifacts based on European artistic principles. Concluding, we focus on how, under varied processes of institutionalisation, these artifacts still undergo different conceptual frameworks, being presented as criminal evidence or artworks, historical documents, or anthropological records, but are also at the center of disputes regarding their institutional relocation, shared custody, and sociocultural framing.

Is Afro-Brazilian Sacred Art Modern Art?: Revising the Collection of Afro-Brazilian Sacred Objects of the Civil Police Museum of the State of Rio de Janeiro

Is Afro-Brazilian Sacred Art Modern Art?: Revising the Collection of Afro-Brazilian Sacred Objects of the Civil Police Museum of the State of Rio de Janeiro

Crimes and Museums, but no Fiction: Portuguese Judiciary Police Museum’s Projects for the Protection of Cultural Heritage 1996-2022

Abstract This article presents three interdisciplinary and community-serving museum projects carried out by the Portuguese Judiciary Police Museum (Museu de Polícia Judiciária – MPJ), two of which are based on original ideas and unprecedented procedures. All three of them are ‘out of the walls’ crime prevention projects for the protection of Portuguese cultural heritage. The first project (starting in 1996) was dedicated to museums, the second (2003) to religious art in places of worship, and the third (2007) to the Portuguese unique and identitary Tile Heritage. The common genesis of the three projects is rooted on the one hand in two competencies of the Portuguese Judiciary Police (Polícia Judiciária, PJ) - crime prevention and crimes linked to cultural heritage – and on the other hand in museum concepts emerged in the last fifty years in museum studies - e. g. Declaration of Santiago do Chile 1972, ICOM Round Table; ‘Siena Charter’ ICOM Italy 2014; new museum definition ICOM Prag 2022. The three interdisciplinary projects – based on important partnerships from different academic areas and society sectors – are described in this article in terms of motives, implemented actions and results, and a final summary evaluation. Notwithstanding the severe financial conditions – all three projects had extremely small or even nonexistent budgets - and many not always surmountable obstacles, all three projects presented measurable positive results, and two of them received important national or international awards and were ‘exported’ to Brazil as models.

Nosso Sagrado Collection


 
 
 This paper presents the current results of the historical research focused on the Nosso Sagrado Collection. This collection is made of African-Brazilian religious objects confiscated by the police in the territories of Umbanda and Candonble, in the city of Rio de Janeiro. The chronology of events discussed includes the origin of the Brazilian Republic Proclamation (1889) and its following six decades. In 2020, after a long political struggle led by the Povo de Santo for reparative justice and memorialization, this collection was transferred from the Museu da Polícia Civil do estado do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro’s state Civil Police Museum) to the Museu da República (Republic Museum), both in the city of Rio de Janeiro.
 
 

Regimes of representation in Canadian police museums: Othering, police subjectivities, and gunscapes

There are dozens of public police museums located across Canada that memorialize the country’s history of law enforcement and criminalization. Drawing from fieldwork at these sites, we explore the representational devices used to curate police museum displays. Invoking Stuart Hall’s work on representation and Othering, we examine how gun displays at Canadian police museums are organized to minimize the harm that police interventions with guns cause. Arguing these displays are made intelligible through a regime of representation that naturalizes the distinction between police officers and the “criminal” Other, we examine how these museums position weaponry including the gun as an esthetic object and a force of social good when in the hands of police. Analyzing curatorial strategies such as the arrangement of weapons, mannequin placement, dress, and level of humanization, as well as the rhetoric and narratives espoused on accompanying placards, we show how the curatorial approach in these spaces ratify an ideological framework that normalizes police violence and criminalization. We then assess what our analysis contributes to literatures on police museums and policing myths.

“Everybody criticizes police, but nobody criticizes museums”: Police Headquarters and Museums as Public Culture

Museums are increasingly placed front-and-centre in police headquarters. Based on interviews, field notes, and observations, we examine the significance of placing museums in the foyers of new police headquarters for public culture and police legitimacy. Drawing from critical heritage, cultural and policing studies literature, we argue the trend represents a strategic means of softening the image of police and creating myths central to reinforcing their legitimacy. We show that studying the representations inside police museums is crucial to comprehend how these entities depict social reality and provide frames through which the public make sense of policing and carcerality more broadly. Conceptualizing police museums as a form of public relations management that has material impacts on urban life and public culture, we reflect on what our findings mean for literature on cultural representations of “criminal justice.”

A coleção de ‘Magia Negra’ e o Terreiro da Casa Branca: cultura (i) material, patrimônio e decolonialidade

Este artigo objetiva discutir as políticas de patrimônio no Brasil, a partir dos anos de 1930, vinculadas ao binômio arte e política, explorando principalmente o tombamento da coleção de ‘Magia Negra’ do Museu da Polícia Civil do Rio de Janeiro em 1938 e o tombamento do Terreiro da Casa Branca do Evangelho Velho em 1986. A tentativa é analisar estes dois processos de tombamento, localizados em espaços temporais distintos e relacionados à cultura (i)material afro-brasileira e às discussões sobre decolonialidade.

Skirts, Stereotypes, and Silences: Representations of Women in Canadian Police Museums

Drawing from interviews, fieldnotes, and visual data, we examine representations of policewomen and gender communicated in Canadian police museums. We examine four trends from our dataset. First, we found silences regarding the history of women in policing in Canada. Second, there was a fetish-like emphasis on women’s police uniforms. Third, when included policewomen were treated in a tokenistic manner. By contrast, displays focusing on men treated them as policing heroes. We argue the history of policing may be one of white male domination, but this facet of social control should not be further normalized by erasing important elements of the histories of women from police museums. In the discussion, we explain what this analysis adds to literatures on representations of women in museums and on representations of policing.

Deeds, Not Words: The Suffragettes and Early Terrorism in the City of London

The City of London still provides us with a very visible, physical representation of policing’s response to the IRA’s mainland bombing campaign of the 1990s: the chicanes, police boxes and CCTV cameras at its entry points that collectively form its protective ‘Ring of Steel’. Terrorism though had announced its arrival in the City some 20 years before the bombs at St Mary Axe and Bishopsgate, with the detonation of an IRA car bomb outside the Old Bailey in 1973 — or so living memory would have us believe. Two seemingly innocuous artefacts in the City of London Police Museum — a milk-can and a Keen’s mustard tin — help give the lie to this perception and provide us with tangible evidence of an earlier, often overlooked bombing campaign. These two everyday household items once contained ‘infernal machines’ — or bombs — that were planted at iconic locations in the City in 1913, but which failed to explode. All the facts point to the would-be bombers being supporters of the Suffragette movement. This article examines the story and significance of the milk-can and mustard tin bombs and the way in which those fighting for women’s suffrage made use of such explosive devices to further their cause. It will explore the similarities and differences between their actions and other terror campaigns that targeted the capital and the ‘establishment’.

Representations of detention and other pains of law enforcement in police museums in Ontario, Canada

ABSTRACTPolice museums have been described as dark tourism destinations that depict death and suffering, yet rarely have they been conceptualised as a form of penal tourism. Applying Diarmaid Harkin’s notion of 'pains of policing' to police museums in Ontario, Canada we illustrate how these sites engage in punishment memorialisation. Police museums, which are increasingly staged in the front of police headquarters, are one of the ways policing organisations communicate with the public about their practices, past and present. Engaging with literature on public meanings of police memorialisation, we show how use of force, arrest, interrogation, detention, and other aspects of law enforcement and penality are represented in these museum settings. Drawing from field notes and visual analysis, we argue that these depictions deflect culpability and blame for police violence and abuses, which are normalised in these representations. In conclusion, we reflect on what our findings mean for literature on police museums specifically, and dark and penal tourism sites more broadly.

Rótulos, etnografía y curadurías en el Museo Histórico de la Policía Nacional, Bogotá

Ensayo visual "Rótulos, etnografía y curadurías en el Museo Histórico de la Policía Nacional, Bogotá"

An Afro-Brazilian Mephistopheles? Considerations on an “Eshu” sculpture of the Rio de Janeiro Civil Police Museum

An Afro-Brazilian Mephistopheles? Considerations on an “Eshu” sculpture of the Rio de Janeiro Civil Police Museum

On Viewing Crime Photographs: The Sleep of Reason

This is a speech presented by Juliet Darling at a symposium at Sydney's Justice & Police Museum in August 2013. The symposium brought together a range of people — judicial officers, artists, writers, curators, scholars, and more — to discuss the Forensic Photography Archive, which is an historical collection of police photographs held by the Museum. Juliet Darling, a film-maker, writer, and artist, was invited following the publication of her book A Double Spring: A Year of Tragedy, Grief and Love (Allen & Unwin 2013).

The kibitzing archive

This essay investigates how nonfiction authors use archives. Whereas scholarly historians adhere to broadly agreed-upon research procedures, and generally work within the context of extant debates and existing, or new, research questions, writers (as well as artists and museum curators) more likely enter archives relatively ‘agenda-free’. This essay draws on the author’s experiences working with the Forensic Photography Archive (Justice and Police Museum, Sydney), and the personal papers of journalist-musician Merv Acheson and policeman Brian K. Doyle. It charts the ‘value-adding’ process whereby the writer-researcher examines archive material at sufficient depth, and for sufficient time, to order raw archival material into groupings and sequences. These, with the necessary background research, might become finished, published narratives. Working with two smaller archives, however, the author finds that the processes of surveying, reflecting and background-researching are somewhat thwarted by the residual ‘authorial’ presences of the original compilers. The Acheson and the Doyle archives, although seemingly random collections, prove to be the outcome of careful selection. Both compilers were adept narrators, and their personal papers, rather than being raw material, might be considered ‘voiced’ and, in a sense, already authored.

Sorcery objects under institutional tutelage: magic and power in ethnographic collections

This essay returns to a discussion of two collections of objects taken from two terreiros (places of worship) for Afro-Brazilian cults, namely the Magia Negra (Black Magic) collection at the Museu da Polícia do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro Police Museum) and the Perseverança collection at the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico de Alagoas - IHGAL (Alagoas Historical and Geographical Institute), in Maceió. In both cases we looked at how members of Brazil's elite are involved in sorcery and how members of this elite circulate in candomblé, xangô, umbanda and other terreiros. In this essay, in particular, we examine the subject of the collections in the context of recent changes arising from heritage-listing policies in Brazil that have decisively affected relations between these objects and institutions charged with protecting and preserving cultural heritage.

Police Museums in Latin America

Organized by the historian Amy Chazkel, who also provides the foreword, this forum gathers the work of three historians of Latin America who have written extensively on the social history of crime, prompting them to reflect on a ubiquitous but little studied public history institution: the police museum. Alejandra Bronfman, Lila Caimari, and Robert Buffington, specialists in Cuba, Argentina, and Mexico, respectively, guide us through a selection of five police museums: one in Havana that played a crucial role in legal medicine and developing ideas about race during Cuba's Republican period but no longer exists; one in Buenos Aires that was founded as part of the early twentieth-century wave of police reform and modernization; and two in Mexico City and one in Guadalajara that mushroomed in the context of the Mexican police's public image hemorrhage of recent decades. This forum is a critical examination of not only objects on display but also the deeper logic of the categorizing schemes used in each museum. The official history of crime presented to the public, epitomized by police museums, provides a fascinating counterpoint to the contemporary academic history of crime in Latin America, which is remarkably diverse but converges on its use of historical analysis to challenge normative understandings of the law and the illicit. Far from “calling the law into question,” unsurprisingly, police museums naturalize and dehistoricize the criminal law. Yet this forum points toward ways in which further research on police museums can shed new light on how the public encounters the most problematic and controversial manifestations of state power.

Institutional Memories

This essay argues that the troubled “birth” of the modern police museum in Mexico offers unique insights into the institutional uses of history as a means for fostering collective identities and social cohesion. Conventional history museums endeavor to produce sweeping historical narratives that reconstruct the forgotten past for a forgetful present—to invent traditions for societies no longer able to access the collective memories (rather than constructed histories) that characterized rural communities and urban neighborhoods in previous eras. In contrast, recent Mexican police museums seek to obliterate a too-well-remembered past that troubles the present and threatens to overwhelm official attempts to give birth to an unencumbered future. The genesis of the Mexican police museum thus opens an unexpected if disturbing window on the birth pangs of an institution—the public museum—whose conceptual stability we have taken too much for granted.

Vestiges of a Hidden Life

The collections displayed at the Buenos Aires Police Museum convey various narratives about police identity. They are organized along two overarching lines. The first, somewhat predictable, may be referred to as “police as corporate identity and symbolic tradition.” It stems from the display of a rather formalized pantheon of heroes, uniformed mannequins, guns, and pieces of old technology. A second, more elusive (though essential) brand of corporate identity points to the police as archaeologists of a hidden life. It blends symbols and professional artifacts with a display of an intimate knowledge of petty crime, criminal episodes embedded in folk memory, and gruesome sensationalism. This essay argues that in this mix of objects evoking technological modernity and empirical knowledge of the “other side” of social reality lies a critical claim to intellectual superiority and professional legitimacy.

Captured (and disturbing for some): A last look at the abortionist

Synopsis This article reflects on a recent exhibition hosted at the Sydney Justice and Police Museum. The Femme Fatale exhibition aimed to highlight the way “society has interpreted and contained the criminality of women”, through the depiction of women convicted of various crimes, including abortion related offences. This article discusses the abortion display of the exhibition to explore the longstanding political anxiety provoked by abortion imagery. It focuses on the ongoing power of the image of abortion, and the female abortionist in particular, and questions the potential for the deployment of such imagery in a feminist context. The article argues that by focusing on the female abortionist as she was targeted by the police, and not on catastrophic outcomes for her patients, the Femme Fatale exhibition highlights the historical, mundane realities of women's reproductive lives, and the centrality of women's networks to this world. It challenges hegemonic medical authority that has claimed women's reproductive praxis as its own, and importantly, alludes to the power historically deployed by midwives before this medical colonisation.

Deadly relic of the Great War.

The curator of a police museum in Trondheim, Norway, recently discovered in his archive collection a glass bottle containing two irregularly shaped sugar lumps. A small hole had been bored into each of these lumps and a glass capillary tube, sealed at its tip, was embedded in one of the lumps (Fig. 1). A note attached to the exhibit translated as follows: “A piece of sugar containing anthrax bacilli, found in the luggage of Baron Otto Karl von Rosen, when he was apprehended in Karasjok in January 1917, suspected of espionage and sabotage”.