Answering the call

The Los Angeles Police Historical Society and Museum needed help. The organization, dedicated to preserving department history and fostering community relations, had boxes and boxes of photographs in storage but no organization system -- much less a coherent idea of what was in the boxes.

Across town, Tracey Schuster, head of special collections and visual resources reference at the Getty Research Institute, was looking for a sabbatical project to dovetail with her interest in military and law enforcement history. The former USO volunteer, with several family members in the Navy, had decades of experience working with collections but had never organized one from scratch.

“This is incredible,” she says she remembers thinking when she first saw the society’s holdings. “Then I thought, this is a big mess, and it needs me.”

As a result of her efforts and those of society Executive Director Glynn B. Martin, the museum housed in the 1925 Highland Park police station is now home to a collection of 15,000 to 20,000 images documenting the history of the LAPD and the city from about 1869 to the early 1980s, with new material added continually.

“The historical significance is tremendous,” Schuster says of the archive. “In addition to documenting LAPD history, there are images that show the history of the city itself -- its architecture, transportation, fashion of the times -- and is unparalleled.”

On Monday, the society and a group of student volunteers will be recognized at an awards luncheon in Washington, D.C., as one of the nation’s top 10 local preservation projects in the History Channel’s “Save Our History” program.

The conservation project took off in April of 2005, when Schuster was granted a three-month paid sabbatical from the Getty Research Institute. Not long after, the historical society received a grant from the History Channel to work with students from Woodrow Wilson High School, a police magnet school.

“We had drawers and drawers of negatives and had no idea what they were of,” says Martin, who retired as an LAPD sergeant II from the Northeast Area (the LAPD designation for the museum’s location) before becoming executive director in 2005. “The first unmarked negative in a glassine sleeve I picked up was of John F. Kennedy shaking hands with Chief [William] Parker.”

The students’ role was to resleeve negatives (about 2,000 of them) and digitize them (about 1,000), so prints can be made available while the negatives stay safely stored away.

Martin explains that the collection was amassed from donations from the families of officers and images saved from various departmental activities. “There’s everything from photos of medal of valor ceremonies and events to personnel portraits and personality shots with people in Hollywood or foreign visitors,” he says.

The LAPD’s photography archive, which includes crime scene images taken in connection with investigations, is separate from the society’s collection, which is more eclectic, with unidentified photographs of old Los Angeles, shots of the San Fernando Valley at the turn of the century and even images of people’s dogs.

There are some police personnel photographs as well, and although that collection is not comprehensive, representatives from every era have been found. Among the oldest images are four poster-size panels that tell the story of Theodore Denny Romans, a Union Army soldier incarcerated at Andersonville, the infamous Confederate prison, during the Civil War. After he was freed, Romans served in the LAPD until he retired in 1905.

The society itself was established in 1989 as a nonprofit, its members mostly active and retired members of the LAPD. Funding comes from donations, fundraisers and fees for filming at its building, which has played a role in TV shows, movies and commercials.

The structure was in use by the LAPD until 1982, when the then-Northeast station moved to Atwater. After suffering damage from vandals, arson and water, it was restored and reopened in 2002 as the society’s headquarters and museum.

The facility is open to the public, with displays of photographs documenting the role of the LAPD during presidential visits to L.A., along with exhibits about police uniforms, the bomb squad and motorcycles. One display covers the North Hollywood shootout, the 1997 bank robbery that left two robbers dead and more than a dozen people, including 10 police officers, injured.

When Schuster arrived at the museum, photographs were being housed in the main building and a nearby trailer (donated by Sylvester Stallone) that had been wired for air-conditioned storage. For two weeks, she sorted through boxes crammed with as much trash as photography. When museum officials decided that the trailer was insufficiently secure for an archive, the material was hauled back into the museum.

As weeks went by, Schuster converted the former roll-call room in the basement into a work space where she sorted images by subject, labeled folders and boxes, created a classification system and began cataloging.

It was the first effort, Martin says, “to intervene, preserve and conserve to make sure these photos will be around for generations to come.”

For the students from Wilson High, it was a chance to gain an appreciation for the history in their hands.

“We came every other week, and some of us would put negatives in an envelope while some were working at the computer,” says Elizabeth Ochoa, a senior who plans to study psychology at the University of San Diego with the goal of becoming a homicide detective. “Seeing these pictures gave us all a different viewpoint on how the LAPD has evolved and its history.”

In addition to the students, a couple of Schuster’s colleagues at the Getty Research Institute came out to help, as did a photo historian who worked on images in need of cleaning or other first aid.

Schuster did minor conservation work, such as removing old tape, and transcribed information onto the backs of images with an archival pencil.

“There were a lot of old brittle photos that were starting to tear and crack, so we stabilized them by sleeving them and getting them organized in boxes,” she says. “Anything 10 by 14 inches or smaller can live in upright boxes, but anything bigger has to go in flat boxes. We put rolled-up photos into plastic bags and stood them on end in a box because they need professional conservation to get them flat.”

She worked with Martin to determine terminology for subject categories, for easy identification and access. The archive itself is not open to the public, but copies of images can be obtained for a fee.

The museum, which provides a meeting room for community groups, also offers research about department history, including to the entertainment industry. It has a fleet of historical vehicles that appear in parades, and a mobile museum that can be sent to community events.

Although her sabbatical has ended, Schuster continues to volunteer as a consultant and has joined the society’s board of directors. She also visits the museum once a month to catalog new acquisitions and continue other work. Only two of 12 series in the collection are fully processed, she says, and it will be a long time before everything is cataloged and accessible.

Even so, “this is making so much material accessible to researchers that wasn’t there before,” she says. “Having a scheme in place means that everything now has a home to go to.”

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Los Angeles Police Historical Society Museum and Community Education Center

Where: 6045 York Blvd., Los Angeles

When: Open to the public 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Mondays through Fridays and 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. the third Saturday of the month.

Price: $4 and $5; free for children under 12

Contact: (323) 344-9445; www.laphs.com