Vintage Large 1950s Silver Special Police Toy Badge 🚔 Nostalgic Memorabilia

Who Was the Cop With His Hand Up? 🦅 Vintage Special Police Toy Badge, Made in Hong Kong

Size: 3 1/4" x 2 3/4"

This is a big one. A dime-store Special Police badge, three and a quarter inches tall, with a spread-winged eagle across the top, a laurel wreath running all the way around the edge, and SPECIAL over POLICE on a black ring with a little star at each side. Right in the middle is my favorite part: a round-faced traffic cop in a peaked cap with his palm held up flat. Stop!

It is plastic, molded and finished in bright silver so it would shine like the real thing on a kid's shirt. Turn it over and MADE IN HONG KONG is raised right in the plastic, with the clip molded into the back. A toy, plain and simple, never police issue, and that is the whole charm of it.

👮 The Traffic Cop

Before there was a signal light on every corner, a policeman stood in the middle of a busy intersection and ran it with his arms, and when his hand went up, everything stopped. The first electric traffic signal went up in Cleveland in 1914, but it was decades before lights reached every town, so for a kid growing up the traffic cop was the most visible policeman there was.

Badge collectors say the traffic officer was one of the most commonly ordered centers on real special police catalog badges, because it told everyone the assignment at a glance. The toy makers clearly noticed, and borrowed him right along with the eagle and the wreath.

🚨 What "Special Police" Meant

The words were not made up for the toy. Towns all over the country swore in special police, auxiliaries and reserves to help when the regular force was stretched thin. San Jose, California is a good example: the day after Pearl Harbor, Chief John N. Black called for a civilian emergency police unit, and the department's own badge history says those early Auxiliary, Reserve or "Special Police" badges were made from chrome, tin and nickel, because other metals had to be saved for the war effort.

This badge is not one of those, and the back of it tells you so.

🏭 Made in Hong Kong

Hong Kong was under Japanese occupation from December 1941 until August 1945, so nothing made there reached American shops during the war. After it, industrialists forced out of mainland China by the civil war settled in Hong Kong and opened plastic factories, most of them a few hundred square feet with a handful of hand-set pressing machines. By the mid-1950s plastic toys were catching on, and after 1965 they took over completely. Hong Kong became known as the "Kingdom of Plastic Toys".

A badge like this came out of those little workshops and went straight to the five-and-dime toy counter, next to the cap guns and the toy handcuffs.

🤠 Heroes of the Day

Kids who pinned one of these on were playing out the heroes they heard on the radio and saw at the Saturday matinee, like The Lone Ranger and Dick Tracy. Both got their start in Detroit: Dick Tracy first chased crooks in the Detroit Mirror in 1931, and The Lone Ranger rode onto the air at WXYZ in 1933.

📦 What You Get

I have a small stack of these, so you will get one like the one shown. It measures 3 1/4" x 2 3/4". Frame it with other dime-store badges, pin it on a jacket for fun, or give it to anybody who grew up playing cops and robbers.