The Metropolitan Police Department is celebrating its 150th anniversary. Breul, of the Homeland Security Bureau, is also the D.C. police historian. Why is the agency called the Metropolitan Police Department?
It was created through an act of Congress in 1861 that created the Metropolitan Police District of Washington. It included the city of Washington, Georgetown — which was its own entity with its own mayor — Washington County and undeveloped Washington.
Was President Lincoln involved?
Abraham Lincoln sat on the first board of police commissioners and directed Zenas Robbins personally with a handwritten note to go to New York and study that police department.
What are some of MPD’s biggest cases?
It was MPD officers who made the arrest at the Watergate and realized they had something more than an office burglary. A lot of people don’t know this because it was kind of done on the sly, but MPD was asked to re-photograph and re-present all the evidence in the Kennedy assassination for a House subcommittee in 1978.
Why was D.C. chosen if the assassination happened in Dallas?
MPD was really cutting-edge with crime scene technology and we were still a federal entity and we had independence so as not to be influenced outside agencies.
What else?
There’s always been high-profile cases in Washington. A German official was assassinated here during World War II, possibly by German agents. There was the Chilean diplomat bombing. The U.S. Capitol was bombed a couple of times in the 1970s. Washington was a busy place during the ’70s.
The Army ran the Lincoln investigation, but MPD detectives conducted interviews and collected evidence from the scene, like a set of opera glasses and Lincoln’s hat.
– Scott McCabe
