Vintage 1960s-1970s Special Police Toy Badge 🚔 Suffolk County NY Tin Litho Pin-Back Button NOS on Display Card Made in Japan

Remember Suffolk County Special Police Toy Badges? 🚔 A Suffolk County Special, Still on the Card

Size: 4" x 2 1/4" ~ New Old Stock, still on its card.

Here's a Suffolk County one, still sealed on its card the way it hung on the dime-store rack. It's a little tin litho pinback, about an inch and a half across, still pinned to its yellow card in its original sleeve — a toy, made for a kid's shirt pocket, and a nicely made one. And they're rare - carded or loose, a Suffolk County one just doesn't come up for sale.

The card is the same one this whole family shares. A motorcycle cop in a white cap and big goggles leans over the handlebars in a dark uniform and yellow gloves, a city skyline behind him, under a red banner reading SPECIAL POLICE BADGE on a yellow field. JAPAN is printed small in the corner; these were tin lithographed there for the American dime-store trade.

🗺️ Suffolk County, Long Island

Suffolk is one of New York's original counties, created in 1683 and named for Suffolk in England, and it runs from the Nassau line all the way out to Montauk Point and Orient Point. The real Suffolk County Police Department is a lot younger than a badge like this might suggest. It came together on January 1, 1960, with 619 officers on the roster. Before that, policing out on Long Island was a patchwork — each town and village ran its own department, and the New York State Police backed them up. The county force was only about ten years old when these hit the racks.

And that county was filling up fast. Right after the war Levittown went up over in Nassau, and the rush out of the city kept rolling east. Suffolk went from about 276,000 people in 1950 to 667,000 in 1960 and past a million by 1970, a whole new generation of Long Islanders growing up in brand-new houses on brand-new streets. A lot of them were kids, too: by 1970 the county counted about 270,000 children between five and fourteen, close to one resident in four. That's a lot of shirt pockets for a Suffolk County badge.

🦅 What's On the Badge

The button itself is a nice bit of small-scale work. There's a red rim on the outside, a ring of navy blue inside that, and then the red field where the design sits. A gold eagle spreads its wings across the top, a banner underneath reads POLICE, and below that a round seal reads COUNTY OF SUFFOLK, NEW YORK, with a pair of laurel sprigs fanning out at the bottom. In the middle of that seal stands a rust-orange animal on a navy-blue ground that most folks call a bull. The county seal actually carries an ox, and this little button copies it right down to that. That ox goes all the way back to the county's first seal. In 1784 the Board of Supervisors had Elias Pelletreau, the Southampton silversmith, make a seal "the bigness of a half-dollar" in "the figure of an ox," with the motto Freedom and Independence. There's no official word on why they picked an ox, but it's often said to stand for the county's farming roots.

🗓️ When These Were Made

There's no date on the card, but the family it belongs to gives it away. The same card design turns up with a New York City button copying the NYPD patch adopted in July 1971, and a San Francisco button copying the patch the SFPD added around 1970 — so these were on the racks in the 1970s.

⭐ When Kids Really Did Get Badges from the Law

The mid-century American childhood this badge comes from was full of real badges given by real officers. Junior deputy programs let sheriffs swear in schoolkids as honorary deputies; school safety patrol programs, organized since the 1920s, put badges and belts on millions of children; police departments handed out badges at parades, fairs, and classroom visits as a matter of civic routine. Sheriffs gave tin badges just like this one out as prizes in their youth programs, too. A Suffolk County badge was the dime-store cousin of all that — the badge a kid could buy with pocket change. That documented world of junior programs is the backdrop this little survivor belongs to.