Vintage 1970s NYPD Special Police Toy Badge 🚔 Tin Litho Pinback Japan NOS Card For Sale

Size: 4 x 2.25 inches

A 1970s Special Police toy badge from Japan: a tin litho pinback reproducing the NYPD shoulder patch adopted July 1, 1971, new old stock on its original yellow card with a cartoon motorcycle officer. A dime-store toy, never a police credential.

• Object: Tin lithograph pinback toy badge on its original illustrated display card, in a clear sleeve
• Button: Red rim; navy shield edged in orange; POLICE DEPARTMENT / CITY OF NEW YORK; scales of justice, five-star band and New York City seal at the center
• Card: Yellow with a red SPECIAL POLICE BADGE header; motorcycle officer in white cap and goggles before a city skyline; JAPAN printed lower right
• Era: 1970s (the patch it copies was adopted July 1, 1971)
• Origin: Japan

New old stock. Never pinned, still carded in its sleeve, litho colors bright.

The patch. New York\'s police took up this shoulder patch on July 1, 1971, worn on the right arm alone until 1991. Its five stars are the five boroughs; the scales of justice stand for the department; the center is the city seal, with a sailor and a Lenape man flanking a shield of windmill sails, beavers and flour barrels. The orange and blue are Dutch, from the Prince\'s Flag of New Amsterdam. Because a copy cannot predate its original, the button is a 1970s piece. Its oldest ancestor is the 1904 \"wheel-horse\" sleeve emblem that Commissioner William McAdoo made every patrolman buy for sixty-five cents.

The city behind it. The patch came in during a rough year. In January 1971 about 20,000 officers called in sick for five days in the \"blue flu\" walkout. The Knapp Commission, appointed by Mayor John Lindsay, opened public corruption hearings in October 1971, and Frank Serpico testified that December. The French Connection, based on detectives Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso\'s real case, won Best Picture in 1972; Al Pacino\'s Serpico followed in 1973. On July 1, 1975 — four years to the day after the patch — the fiscal crisis cost about 5,000 officers their jobs, and police unions handed tourists a million \"Fear City\" pamphlets with a hooded skull on the cover. The card, meanwhile, shows a cartoon cop riding out in goggles against a sunny yellow sky.

Kid cops. In 1914 Captain John Sweeney founded New York\'s Junior Police on the Lower East Side, and by its peak more than 4,000 uniformed boys drilled in 22 precincts; it became the Police Athletic League in 1936. The tradition spread across the country, where sheriffs running youth programs gave tin-litho toy badges like this one out as prizes.

The last of Japanese tin. Japan\'s tin toy trade peaked from about 1952 to 1962 and filled Woolworth, W.T. Grant and Ben Franklin counters. By the 1970s plastic, rising wages and stricter safety rules were moving the work to Hong Kong and Taiwan, and the yen\'s 16.9 percent revaluation of December 1971 made Japanese goods dearer in America. A tin badge marked JAPAN that copies a 1971 patch belongs to that closing chapter.

• NYPD and New York City memorabilia collectors
• Police patch and insignia collectors
• Carded Japanese tin toy collectors
• Fans of 1970s New York, Serpico and The French Connection
• A gift for a homesick New Yorker