HOW THE WORK WAS DONE
Investigating before digital.
Police work in Ralph Palmer’s era depended on paper, telephones, call boxes, radio dispatch as it developed, in-person interviews, fingerprints, photographs, lineups, surveillance and records stored in physical files. A detective carried information between people and places rather than pulling it from a networked database.
Methods also changed over a twenty-five-year career. This room keeps equipment and procedure tied to the period in which it was used so a 1960s practice is not casually projected backward into the late 1940s.