A beheading axe from the 18th century, items related to famous crimes and murder investigations as well as an extensive collection of forged art - all of these items will become a part of the collection of the Police Museum as the National Police Museum and the Crime Museum join together in April 2019.
Finland's National Bureau of Investigation houses a Crime Museum in its headquarters in Vantaa. The museum presents material connected with Finnish crime history and crime investigation. The exhibition is still stored at the headquarters of National Bureau of Investigation, but the National Police Museum is responsible for the collection and exhibitions of the Crime Museum in the future.
- The Crime Museum is not open for the general public due to security and data protection reasons. However, in the future anyone can familiarize themselves with the intriguing items and stories of the Crime Museum as they are included to the exhibitions of the Police Museum, tells the Intendant of the National Police Museum Tiina Tuulasvaara-Kaleva .
- The new exhibition, The police is here! , will open in June. It will include objects from the collection of the Crime Museum, such as the beheading axe from the 18th century and the bomb found in the police search of the home of Eugen Schauman . The collections of the Crime Museum are exhibited more broadly in a few years as we open an exhibition of forged art.
The oldest museum of the police
The Crime Museum was established in 1937 as a part of the Crime Research Centre. The exhibition was used as a teaching tool for the police. It illustrated what kind of crimes had been made, what evidence was examined and how the cases were resolved. The Crime Museum has been a part of the National Bureau of Investigation since 1955.
The collections of the museum include instruments of crime, investigation materials, samples from crime scenes, crime scene investigation instruments and devices as well as photographs. There are about 5,000 objects and about 16,000 photographs.
The National Police Museum was established in 2004. It opened its doors to the public on its own premises in Hervanta, Tampere, in 2008. The museum presents the history and operations of the Finnish police from the Middle Ages to today.
The caretaker of the Crime Museum, Assessor Viljo Wathén investigating finger prints in 1955. The vivid stories of Wathén were famous for they made some of the visitors nauseous.
