Abstract
<jats:p>The Police Gazette was one of the more unusual journalistic ventures that appeared in 1897. It was a professional police gazette that covered a wide range of topics – from social policy and dark history, urban crime and marginal phenomena, to issues related to local administration. Thanks to an original and well-thought-out concept, the Police Gazette did not change its editorial policy during the sixteen years of its existence. The peculiar originality of this weekly was to be found in the combination of numerous feuilletons with world classics of the crime genre. In addition, it was up-to-date with current European scientific and criminalistic content. An attractive combination of the morbid from the field of dark histories with an abundance of sensationalism ensured the long-term future and popularity of this weekly. One of the qualities of this newspaper was the abundance of illustrative material, technical drawings, and high-resolution photographs it offered. At the same time, it did not hesitate to present in an extremely negative light representatives of the marginal worlds: gamblers, burglars, counterfeiters or vagrants. The Police Gazette, with its open approach, shocked and captivated its audience. Almost as if it were a forerunner of later tabloid journalism, the Police Gazette became a kind of Pillar of Shame exposing to the public gaze photographs of many persons until then nameless. It was a newspaper that incited and spread anxiety and moral panic among the readers. The Police Gazette simultaneously fed the audience’s curiosity with fresh news about the world of crime, while at the same time inundating it with an abundance of new scientific findings from the fields of criminology, psychology and anthropology.</jats:p>