Phoenix Police Museum Returns Home to its Crime-Solving Roots
The Phoenix Police Museum doesn’t just display history; it’s the site of one of the nation’s most important police cases.
“The museum is in the building where Ernesto Miranda was brought in 1963, interviewed and fingerprinted by Phoenix detectives, held in what's now our archive space, and taken upstairs to the jail, events that led to the Supreme Court’s Miranda v. Arizona case, which strengthened every person's right to be informed of their rights before questioning,” says Museum Curator Paul Taliercio. “That history being literally under our roof still gets me.”
The museum, located in Historic City Hall at 17 South 2nd Avenue, is, in a sense, the Phoenix Police Museum's second homecoming. “Our current home was Phoenix Police headquarters from the late 1920s through the mid-1970s,” Taliercio says. “It was also the site of a temporary six-month exhibit that opened in October 1993, built by volunteers with help from Cindy Myers, former director of the Phoenix Museum of History.”
That pilot proved there was sufficient material and public interest to justify a permanent museum. With support from two Arizona Humanities Council grants, the museum opened a permanent exhibit at the Barrister Place Building, 101 South Central Avenue, Suite 100, on October 6, 1995.
The building, formerly the Jefferson Hotel, was where Alfred Hitchcock filmed the opening shot of Psycho in 1960. “The museum had about 2,200 square feet, provided complimentary by the City and included a mock-up of a 1910s city street, a memorial room, an old jail cell, and interactive vehicle and uniform displays,” Taliercio says.
But the City closed Barrister Place for budget reasons, relocated other tenants by February 2011, and required the museum, the last remaining tenant, to move out by July 2011. “There wasn't another city space available, and as a small nonprofit we couldn't afford to buy or lease long-term on our own,” Taliercio says. Fortunately, a space opened in the basement of Historic City Hall for the museum.
Taliercio says it’s tough to pick a favorite part of the museum. “The Miranda exhibit is our anchor; it's not a re-creation,” he says. “Miranda, it's the reason people specifically seek us out.”
Another big draw is the many hands-on opportunities, especially for young visitors. “What lights kids up is the helicopter, the motorcycles, and the patrol cars, anything they can climb on and imagine being an officer themselves,” Taliercio says.
In its own category entirely is The Fallen Officers Memorial. “It’s a quiet, sacred space that honors those who gave everything in service to this community, and it stops almost every visitor in their tracks,” Taliercio says.
The museum is almost entirely self-funded, with no corporate sponsor. About 1,800 Phoenix Police Department and city employees sustain it by contributing $5 a month through payroll deduction, plus roughly 100 community and retired-officer members. A mobile museum trailer also takes exhibits to schools and community events.
Taliercio gives a shout-out to those who built the museum before him, especially Mike Nikolin, a retired Phoenix Police lieutenant who headed the museum through its Barrister Place years and led the move to its current home. “He's the reason there's a museum here for me to curate today.”
Nikolin’s detailed, welcoming approach was evident when the museum unveiled its exhibit trailer in 2008. He personally invited Emma Groom, one of the department's first four uniformed policewomen, who joined in 1957, to see her image on the trailer. “That kind of care in tracking people down and bringing them back into the museum's story is really the foundation on which everything since has been built,” Taliercio says.