Vintage 1960s-1970s Indianapolis Police Special Toy Badge Pin 🚔 Tin Litho on Card Mid-Century Japan Dime Store NOS

Size: 4 x 2.25 inches ~ New Old Stock, still on its card. They vary a little one to the next.

🚔 Indianapolis Police, Monument and All

Here's one for anybody who grew up anywhere near Monument Circle. It's a little tin litho pinback button, about an inch and a half across, reading INDIANAPOLIS around the top and POLICE along the bottom in gold on deep navy inside a red rim, and right in the middle, drawn in clean white lines, is the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument. It's still pinned to its yellow card and sealed in its sleeve, just the way it hung on the dime-store rack. It's a toy, made for kids, and a great one. And they're rare - carded or loose, an Indianapolis one just doesn't come up for sale.

The card is half the fun. A cartoon motorcycle cop fills the left side: white cap, big goggles, gloved hands on the handlebars, a city skyline behind him, all under a red banner that reads SPECIAL POLICE BADGE. Down in the corner, in small letters, it says JAPAN. That's where these were made, printed in tin by Japanese lithographers for the American dime-store trade.

🏛️ The Monument on the Button

That tower isn't just decoration. The real Indianapolis police carried the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument on their own badge, so whoever drew this toy was copying the real thing, the same way the other buttons on this card copy their own towns' patches.

The monument came out of an 1887 design competition. Seventy designs came in, and the winner, picked unanimously, was Bruno Schmitz of Berlin with an entry he called Symbol of Indiana. It took from 1888 to 1901 to build out of Owen County limestone, it was dedicated on May 15, 1902, and it stands 284 feet 6 inches to the top of Victory, the thirty-foot, ten-ton bronze figure on the crown. It honors Hoosiers who served from the Revolution through the Spanish-American War, and it has been the picture of the city ever since. Look at the button and you can see it drawn in miniature: the wide stepped base and the shaft rising above it.

👮 Indianapolis Police, 1854 to 2006

The Indianapolis Police Department went on duty September 1, 1854, and its first officers had nothing but a silver star to tell you who they were. They got uniforms in July 1862 (a dark blue coat, light blue trousers with a cord down the seam, and a blue cap), and around the turn of the century they were patrolling on Rambler bicycles. The department ran right up to December 31, 2006. The next day it merged with the road division of the Marion County Sheriff's Office to become the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department, so the name on this little button belongs to a department that isn't there anymore.

🗓️ When These Were Made

There's no date on the card, but the rest of the family gives it away. The same yellow card carries 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 hanging on the racks in the 1970s.

🚔 The Real Junior Programs Behind Badges Like This

Dime-store tin badges did not live in a vacuum. Across mid-century America, real law enforcement agencies ran junior deputy and junior police programs: sheriffs swore in wide-eyed honorary junior deputies at county fairs and school assemblies, police departments sponsored school safety patrols — a movement that began in the 1920s and put belts and badges on millions of schoolchildren — and an officer handing a kid a badge at a parade or classroom visit was a familiar piece of civic life. Sheriffs gave tin badges just like this one out as prizes in their youth programs, too. An Indianapolis Special Police badge in a child's hand belonged to that same world, the era when a badge from a trusted grown-up could make a kid stand a little straighter. That is the history a carded survivor like this carries beyond its tin and ink.