Paris Police Museum

This new Blogger interface is really difficult. I won't waste too much of your time complaining about it.

One of the lesser known museums in Paris is their Police Museum. Cops like to have museums, Scottsdale has one....Memphis has one.

What's important about law enforcement in France is that there were two giants of forensic science, both were Frenchman. One was Alphonse Bertillion of Paris who in the 1880's, using a very logical system, developed a method of identifying individuals before fingerprints were used. If appearance & body build made people different, why not use these measurements to classify them? So he went about creating "Bertillion measurements" by measuring head shape, distance between the eyes, arm length & a whole host of other measurements. Long story short (LSS), this went on for awhile until two individuals were found having the same Bertillion measurements. Oooops!!! At the same time, the British in India were using fingerprints to keep track of employees...that quickly replaced the Alphonse way. Here is a diorama of Bertillion taking a photograph of a subject while an assistant was taking notes.

Another French giant of forensic science was Edmund Locard who in 1910 created the world's first crime lab in Lyon, France's 2nd largest city. Every crime lab from the big kahuna at the FBI in Washington, DC to the lab at Scottsdale Police Dept. owes its start to Locard. He also came up with a basic principle of forensic science.

Basically, he observed that when an individual interacts with a crime scene, each leaves its trace on the other.


But I could not find anything about Locard at this museum. A very nice lady had an office inside the museum and lucky for me she left the door open. LSS, we had a very nice discussion, about 2/3 in English, 1/3 French, but it worked. She said with regret there was much competition among police departments and despite Locard's being a forensic giant he was Lyon, they were Paris. Desolee!! (Apologies. Accents are difficult on a netbook with no numeric keypad.)



Here's a real live guillotine. No info as to its history. Just some basic statistics...I wrote down that it weighs 8.8 kgs, just under 20 lbs.



















An edict from Le Grande Fromage...
















In 1870 there was another citizen's revolt called the Paris Commune. But this time the cure was far worse than the disease. This painting shows a massacre at a Paris police facility by the Communards as they were called. Lots of good people (the archbishop of Paris for one) died unnecessarily. The citizens got fed up. In 1871 the government retook control. Ron Paul, are you listening? This is another of history's example of your ideas run amok.






Here's a more recent bit of history. It is an execution post used during the occupation of Paris in World War II. The post has been really chewed up by the bullets.




















And finally today...a Paris police bike unit prepares to hit the streets.












I'm getting the hang of the work-arounds needed to cope with the new interface. It'll slow me down but it won't stop me.