VAN NUYS : Police Go Pog Wild to Send Kids a Message

Some grade-schoolers may have a pocketful of dope, but many more have a pocketful of Pogs, and police in Van Nuys have created their own version of the popular bottle caps to spread law enforcement messages.

Designed by Officer Joe Losorelli with help from a Van Nuys print shop, the official Los Angeles Police Department Van Nuys Division Pogs are already a hit. In fact, the first batch is already gone, with 3,000 being snapped up at the Van Nuys Air Show earlier this month.

“The phones are ringing off the hook from people trying to get more,” said Losorelli.

The division, in cooperation with the Los Angeles Dodgers, has long offered local youngsters special police baseball cards, Sgt. Bob Shallenberger said, and the Pogs are intended to serve the same purpose.

“It’s to develop communications” with the younger set, he said. “A lot of people in our community are from other countries where police have earned a reputation of being feared. These are a way for us to break the ice.”

On one side of the police-issue cardboard disk is a badge and the LAPD acronym. Flip it over and it reads, “Be Smart, Be Cool, Don’t Do Drugs.”

The department paid $120 for the first 1,000, Losorelli said, and Lutz Printing Specialists Inc.--which helped in the design--pitched in another 2,000 for free.

“Because kids like these Pogs so much, we figured this would be a great way to get the message across,” Losorelli said.

A Hawaiian import more popular with kids than pineapple, Pog stands for passion fruit-orange-guava, a popular juice blend on the islands that comes in bottles capped with such lids.

An Oahu schoolteacher told students in 1991 of her childhood days collecting similar caps from milk bottles. The kids began their own collections, named the old-style caps Pogs, and initiated what has become a full-blown fad.

Pogs began catching on in Southern California early this summer, and are now sold everywhere from supermarkets to makeshift roadside stands.

“Pogs are the hot thing this year,” Sgt. Shallenberger said.

And they have turned out to be such a popular marketing tool the division is ordering more.

The new ones will feature the same logo, but read, “Be smart, be cool, stay in school.”

They may be ready as soon as Friday, Shallenberger said, and the plan is to “put a handful in each officer’s pocket” to hand out on the street.