Sgt. Nicholas Breul, 45, is the first historian of the Metropolitan Police Department.
How did you get that job?
I grew up in D.C. and I have a degree in history from Hobart College. One day in 1994, I went into a room and saw the remnants of what was basically the old police museum shoved into a corner. I’ve sort of been on a crusade since.
What made you want to preserve those items?
An overwhelming sense of sadness. This is a great police department. The duty and service of a lot of men and women was being forgotten, mistreated. Our history is full of lots of presidential stuff, between John Parker, who was responsible for protecting Lincoln, to Patrick Kearney, the private who captured the man who shot and mortally wounded James Garfield, to the assassination attempt on Reagan, where one of our guys, Thomas Delahanty, was also shot.
As they say, “This is the capital of the nation, but the streets belong to the Metropolitan Police Department.”
What’s your favorite piece of D.C. police history?
It’s not exactly D.C. police history, but the trial of Daniel Sickles. Sickles was the guy who shot Francis Scott Key’s son at Lafayette Park in 1859 when he finds out his wife is having an affair. He shoots Philip Barton Key. Bam!
Sickles becomes the first person to successfully argue temporary insanity. He then goes on and becomes a Civil War general. At Gettysburg, he’s shot in the leg and had it amputated, but he keeps it. It’s pickled at Walter Reed hospital, and he used to visit it. If that’s not weird, I don’t know what is.
I understand your great-greatgrandfather was P.T. Barnum.
Maybe there’s a family penchant for that sort of thing.
