Smithsonian Police is a national labor union of law enforcement officers and agents. Smithsonian Police The Smithsonian Institution Office of Protection Services is the guard force of the Smithsonian Institution. It is a federal guard force consisting of 850 officers with very limited special police authority tasked with protecting visitors, staff, property, and grounds of the federally owned and managed Smithsonian Institution museums and research centers in Washington, D.C., New York City, at the 2,800 acre Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Maryland as well as oversight of the security operations at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. According to a 1978
Smithsonian Institution History was the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, which opened in 1974. The National Air and Space Museum, the Smithsonian's largest in terms of floor space, opened in June 1976. Eleven years later, the National Museum of African Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery opened in a new, joint, underground museum between the Freer Gallery and the Smithsonian Castle. Reuse of another old building came in 1993 with the opening of the National Postal Museum in the 1904 former City Post Office building, a few city blocks from the Mall. In 2004, the Smithsonian opened the National Museum of