Curating police archives in England : an example of syncretism of practices

Absent from national legal repositories, the archives and heritage collections of English police forces remain with their producers. They are the subject of undifferentiated exhibition practices for artefacts and documents. An inventory and analysis of the exhibition spaces in which these collections are displayed reveals systems of storytelling and staging that invalidate the primary and secondary documentary values of the archives on display. There is, however, a marginal but growing tendency to go beyond the construction of a discourse of police identity and remembrance for the sake of the police, through the practice of qualified archivists and curators, who are in a minority in this context. They advocate abandoning Manichean positions by using the exhibits as a connector between the people and contexts documented, and the public.