As I wrote recently in The Nation, the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial emerged as a focal point around which to stage highly publicized commemorations during National Police Week, the handiwork of South Carolina’s U.S. Senator Olin Dewitt Johnston, a shameless white supremacist and former governor.

Signed into law by President John F. Kennedy in 1962, National Police Week languished in its first years as the great social movements of the 1960s fostered mass criticism and disdain for American police practices and corruption. That began to change through the steady drumbeat of “law and order” by Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon, which the rising evangelical right buttressed in its well-financed propaganda campaigns against American “radicalism.”

The police narrative that ours is a dangerous and unruly country triumphed with the presidential election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Since then, the power and militarization of the police have grown exponentially, reflected in the grotesque expenditure of hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars that underpin an infrastructure of surveillance, the courts, and mass incarceration.

Republicans and Democrats alike have supported the on-going enlargement of the police ranks and their protection from immunity. For a chilling distillation of this history, I highly recommend Yance Ford’s documentary “Power,” now streaming on Netflix.

In 1982, a group of police officers called on U.S. Representative Mario Biaggi (D-NY/The Bronx) in Washington, D.C. to ask that he spearhead the campaign for a national monument to honor the profession’s line-of-duty deaths. Biaggi, a twenty-three-year police veteran and the most decorated officer in NYPD history, had attempted to secure congressional approval for such a memorial in 1975, but failed. Sensing a shift in American attitudes toward law enforcement, he agreed to try again. (Biaggi’s award of the NYPD’s Medal of Honor stemmed from his stopping a runaway horse in 1942. He also notched the killing of two civilians.)

On October 19, 1984, just two weeks after launching the War on Drugs, President Ronald Reagan signed Biaggi’s proposal into law. The authorizing legislation required that construction of the “National Law Enforcement Heroes Memorial” begin no later than October 19, 1989, on a site to be determined in concert with the National Park Service (N.P.S.) and other review boards. All monies for its expense, which ultimately reached $11 million, had to be raised from private sources before groundbreaking could occur.

The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund (NLEOMF) was organized to manage the project. Incorporated in 1984 as a nonprofit in the District of Columbia, its founding board of directors included representatives from fifteen national law enforcement organizations. Their combined membership encompassed the totality of law enforcement personnel employed at the federal, state, and local levels.

Craig W. Floyd, a Biaggi aide, took the helm. Casting about for expertise, he found inspiration in the herculean accomplishment of Jan Scruggs, the decorated Vietnam veteran and founder of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, who, in a mere three years’ time, envisioned a war memorial on the National Mall and brought to completion Maya Lin’s controversial design, which was dedicated on November 13, 1982. Hiring Scruggs, the NLEOMF moved quickly to raise money, hire an architect, and select a site among the fifty then eligible on federal land.

The N.P.S. first suggested Memorial Avenue, the roadway connecting Arlington National Cemetery to Memorial Bridge and the Lincoln monument, but NLEOMF rejected it. According to its official history, To Serve and Protect: A Tribute to American Law Enforcement, “Craig Floyd and the Memorial board of directors were looking for a grander prominence and location, more in keeping with the Memorial’s importance.” They countered with a request for the Ellipse, the fifty-two acre open space behind the White House that fronts Constitution Avenue and the Washington Monument beyond. (The Ellipse is a favorite spot for congressional softball games and is home to the National Christmas Tree; President Donald J. Trump held his “Stop the Steal” rally there on January 6, 2021, leading to the desecration of the U.S. Capitol.) N.P.S. explained to Floyd that federal statute prohibited building on the Ellipse, which elicited “hundreds of letters fired off by angry police officers” upon hearing of the rejection.

The agency steered Floyd instead to Judiciary Square, home to the Georgetown University Law Center and numerous federal and District of Columbia courthouses, located a half mile northwest of the U.S. Capitol. Finding it “a pretty shabby site, overgrown with weeds and furnished with some crumbling park benches,” Floyd took offense at the suggestion, seeing the “inner-city plaza” as a poor substitute for the Ellipse, despite its being off-limits to monuments.

Unbeknownst to Floyd, Judiciary Square had been designated for the U.S. Supreme Court by Pierre L’Enfant, the brilliant French architect who laid out the national capital. His lamentable dismissal by President George Washington in 1792 delayed the high court’s construction for 140 years. During the Civil War, thousands of wounded Union soldiers lay in the open air of Judiciary Square, having overwhelmed the capacity of the adjacent City Hospital. Untold numbers of them died on its grass, their corpses accumulating faster than they could be removed for burial.

The Pathos of Judiciary Square

Elizabeth Robeson

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May 14

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More than a century later, Floyd stood in the decrepit square mulling his organization’s dilemma. Glancing around, he noticed the words “Police Court” inscribed on a nearby court building, which sparked an epiphany: “It almost seemed Judiciary Square had been created for this purpose, as it would place the Memorial squarely among federal and local court buildings, and in close proximity to FBI headquarters, Metro Transit Police headquarters, and DC Metropolitan Police headquarters.” Floyd later explained the NLEOMF’s change of heart. “The site,” he said, “has strong linkage to law enforcement and its three acres will accommodate the thousands of police family members and supporters expected to attend the annual National Peace Officers’ Memorial Day ceremony on May 15.”

Groundbreaking ceremonies for the memorial were held in late October 1989. Standing on terrain where Union soldiers once lay moldering, President George H.W. Bush delivered the keynote address before a crowd of two thousand law enforcement personnel and a slew of cabinet members, members of Congress, and federal agency directors. “The story to be carved on these walls,” he asserted, “is the story of America—of a continuing quest to preserve both democracy and decency and to protect a national treasure that we call the American Dream.” Former U.S. attorney general Edwin Meese delivered President Reagan’s terse tribute: “No single group is more fully committed [than law enforcement] to the well-being of their fellow Americans.”

Conspicuously absent from the ceremony was Mario Biaggi, who holds pride of place in the memorial’s genesis and pantheon; a full-page tribute to him figures prominently in To Protect and Serve. Yet nowhere in this voluble NLEOMF history is his absence from the photos of the groundbreaking acknowledged or explained. In fact, Biaggi had been forced to resign from Congress the previous year after his conviction in two separate corruption trials that brought over a dozen indictments including bribery, extortion, obstruction of justice, and tax evasion, the majority and most serious of them stemming from his role in the infamous Wedtech defense contracting scandal. Sentenced to prison for ten and a half years and $750,000 in fines (which he never paid), Mario Biaggi, his appeals denied, spent NLEOMF groundbreaking day in a Texas federal penitentiary.

Design and construction of the memorial required two additional years. Davis Buckley, architect, and Raymond Caskey, sculptor, both of Washington, D.C., created its most significant features: two low, three-hundred-foot long, curvilinear walls of blue-gray marble that open on either side of an elliptical plaza, cupped by an allée of linden trees; and a series of life-size bronze lions and cubs, rendered in watchful and playful postures to signify the protector (law enforcement) and the protected (the innocent American civilian). Inscribed under one solitary lioness are the words of Tacitus: “In valor there is hope,” while a large male lion’s head rests on a nearby marble panel that quotes a police widow: “It is not how these officers died that made them heroes. It is how they lived.”

Given Jan Scruggs’s involvement with the project, it is unsurprising that the NLEOMF incorporated the most resonant feature of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial: the chiseled names of the dead. The question of whose names would be included and how they should be arranged gave rise to spirited, sometimes contentious, debate. Again, To Protect and Serve:

At first, [the NLEOMF board] decided to include names back to only 1961, when the FBI started keeping national records on law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty. The Memorial Fund would have the benefit of reliable data, and they would not have to start from scratch. But the Memorial Fund was immediately faced with a dilemma: What would happen to an officer who had died on December 31, 1960? If the family were to approach the Memorial Fund with ample documentation about their loved one’s slaying how could the Fund refuse to include his or her name? The concept of a cutoff date for inclusion on the Memorial just didn’t seem right. For this reason, the Fund decided then and there to collect all the names of slain officers—as far back as records would take the researchers.

To collect those names, NLEOMF staff contacted over fifteen thousand law enforcement departments across the nation, asking that they gather information about their line-of-duty deaths, effectively deputizing a large cadre of police officers as research historians. When the monument was finally dedicated on October 15, 1991, some ten thousand officers, who, the day before had marched en masse from the U.S. Capitol to Judiciary Square, gathered there again to hear the last of a twenty-four-hour roll call of the 12,561 inaugural names and the remarks of President Bush.

Every year since, the NLEOMF has hosted a candlelight vigil on the evening of May 13 as part of its National Police Week ceremonies. Presided over by U.S. presidents and attorneys general, the ceremony outgrew Judiciary Square several years ago and is now held on the National Mall, drawing tens of thousands of people from around the nation. Its climactic feature is the roll call of officers who died during the previous calendar year, along with names that have surfaced from the past and been certified by the J. Edgar Hoover Research Center at the National Law Enforcement Museum. (The museum, a second, $80 million undertaking of the NLEOMF, opened in October 2018 across the street on the plaza of the District’s Court of Appeals.)

In 2003, US attorney general John Ashcroft, who later served as CEO of the NLEOMF, eulogized the 377 officers inducted that year, saying, “These names represent some of America’s finest human beings. They died as they lived. Serving justice. Preserving peace. I am grateful to them.” Of that total, 229 had died many years previously. Among them was Henry Hampton Howard, sheriff of Aiken County, South Carolina, who fell on April 25, 1925, now enshrined as a martyred American hero.

I stumbled on to Howard as part of a doctoral dissertation. My life would never be the same.