Featured Product - Bigger Than a Badge

The Badge Company of New Jersey is your source for more than just badges. We offer a full range of public safety products, including Garrett brand metal detectors. Some of the Garrett hand-held models are seen elsewhere on this site, but we also carry the walk-through model PD6500i, pictured here.

This is an immensely popular unit, in use quite literally worldwide, in airports, courthouses, schools, sports stadia and mass transit facilities. Contact our office to learn more about this product, or check out Garrett’s site at http://www.garrett.com/security/s_pd6500i_key.htm

Potty Mouth

Generally, people outside of law enforcement have no idea of the unusual hazards one may face while on the job... Such as:

New Brunswick -- A city man arrested for fighting was taken to police headquarters, where he took a mouthful of water from a toilet and spit at an officer, police said.

In this case, we think the criminal got the more unpleasant portion of this, but still...

In A.C. for N.J.L.M.

This Tuesday through Thursday, November 17-19, The Badge Company of New Jersey will once again be exhibiting at the New Jersey League of Municipalities conference in Atlantic City – come see us!

We will be in booth #240 in the Atlantic City Convention Center, where we will have a display of our products, plus catalogs and brochures covering not only our products but also the products of our manufacturing partners. And we will have a bowl of candy for those of you who wish you could have once again been a trick-or-treater on Halloween.

At this event we showcase much more than police badges. In addition to our law enforcement products we offer a broad range of products applicable to municipal needs. From beach badges to ID holders to safety vests to emergency lighting and more, The Badge Company of New Jersey has a wide assortment of public safety products.

This is the 94th annual NJLM conference so it is not an untried concept! It is the place where some 19,000 representatives of local government, as well as county and state agencies, come together to participate in seminars, see the latest in public service products and services, and, to coin a phrase, network. Each year we meet old and new customers alike, but more satisfyingly, we meet old and new friends as well.

So come check us out in booth #240. Complete conference and exhibit information is available on the NJLM web site, http://www.njslom.org./

BUSted

Not everyone gets to see their car again after it is stolen. Very few get to see it 35 years later. Virtually no one gets to see it in fully-restored condition. But this past week Michele "Mikey" Carlson Squires got to see her Volkswagen bus for the first time since it was stolen in 1974 in her hometown of Spokane, Washington.

Fully restored and worth substantially more than the insurance settlement Ms Squires received all those years ago, the van was discovered by customs officers at the port of Los Angeles during a routine search of a container bound for Europe.

Before being exported, every vehicle must have a certified or original copy of the title among the documents authorizing it to leave the country. "Through a system check and the National Insurance Crime Bureau, we were able to determine this vehicle was stolen," said Todd Hoffman, director for U.S. Customs and Border Protection at the Port of Los Angeles/Long Beach.

Agents opened the container and checked the vehicle's title against the vehicle identification number. They then contacted California Highway Patrol and the Spokane Police Department. A police report indicated that the vehicle was stolen between 6:45 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. on July 12, 1974.

However, Ms Squires cannot simply claim her VW. A self-described "wannabe hippie" when the van was stolen but today a grandmother of five, she received the insurance settlement back then and so the van legally belongs to the insurance company.

Typically, stolen cars go to auction if they are recovered. In this case the insurance company reports that it is exploring other options because it is such a distinctive case.

Not An Ordinary Police Car

The 2007 winner of Law and Order magazine’s International Police Vehicle Design contest in the small town category (for municipal police departments with fewer than 50 members) was this Dodge Charger from the Hummelstown Borough Police Department in Pennsylvania.

But this was not the only honor for this car. It later became the prototype for a Matchbox model. (If you do not know what a Matchbox car is, you were never a young boy.)





Recently, the full-size car was displayed at a Matchbox collectors’ convention in Hershey, Pennsylvania. In the photo below, a young Matchbox collector -- the son of The Badge Company of New Jersey's web designer -- stands in front of the real thing.

Just Plane Cops

In the photo are members of the Perth Amboy Police Department, pulling on a rope attached to a Boeing 737 at Newark Airport. For what possible reason are these officers trying to move a jetliner by hand? For the Special Olympics.

For their efforts the Perth Amboy Police Department won first place in the 13th annual Continental Airlines Plane Pull, held in September. They were the best of more than 40 teams from around the state in an event that this raised more than $87,000, according to a representative from Special Olympics New Jersey. Most of the funds were donated by community businesses supporting the teams.

While the sum raised is impressive, so is the feat. The aircraft weighed 93,000 pounds, and the Perth Amboy team moved it 12 feet – the proscribed distance – in 5.32 seconds. We sometimes have trouble moving ourselves 12 feet in 5.32 seconds.

The 20-man Perth Amboy team was not the only winning team. While they claimed honors for the fastest pull, the team from Marlboro Township won the "lowest weight" category, for the team with the lightest combined weight. The six-member Marlboro team, weighing less than 970 pound in total, nonetheless hauled the 46-ton place twelve feet.

See the complete results at http://www.sonj.org/LawEnforcement/PlanePull/Home.php

HI

A significant 50th anniversary took place this past summer: The 50th anniversary of Statehood for Hawaii. But, unlike Alaska’s celebration of the 50th anniversary of its Statehood some months earlier, in Hawaii there were no gala parties or grand commemorations. Instead, the anniversary passed with little more than a sober conference on Hawaii’s place in the modern world.

The reason for the low-key approach is that there exists lingering discomfort with the U.S. takeover of the islands in 1893 and with the commercial exploitation of Hawaiian culture that followed Statehood in 1959.

Still, there is no question that this is a milestone worthy of consideration. We have now been a union of 50 states for 50 years.

Statehood for both Alaska and Hawaii in an eight-month period in 1959 occurred while we were a child, just learning how the United States grew from 13 colonies. As a result, we got the false impression that adding states was something that was done regularly. Only as years passed with no more new states did we begin to gain the appropriate perspective.