New Badge of Honor

When new Police Chief Art Lopez arrived fresh from the LAPD, some of the first concerns he heard from his officers went straight to the heart: the Oxnard Police Department badge.

In Los Angeles, police officers carry a time-honored, if occasionally tarnished, symbol of sturdiness and reliability: a gold shield studded with an image of L.A.’s stately City Hall.

But for the last 30 years, officers in Oxnard have carried an unassuming piece of metal embossed with an eagle--the same generic badge worn by shopping-mall and office-lobby security guards.

Some of Oxnard’s finest were itching for a new one, with an icon that means something to Oxnard.

So Lopez put his cops to the test.

“There’s no stronger symbol for police officers than the badge, and that’s why I was hesitant, at first, to change things,” said Lopez, who suggested that officers vote on whether to switch badges.

Neither Sgt. Doug Wiley nor Officer Mike Marostica claims any artistic talent, but both felt strongly about a new badge. So they took it upon themselves to redesign the department’s symbol of authority.

They considered featuring several buildings on the badge, including the too-squat-and-square police station, the pagoda in Plaza Park, and Santa Clara Church, before settling on the Carnegie Art Museum, the “prettiest building in the city,” Wiley said.

Built in 1906 as a library, the Doric-columned museum was one of 2,800 libraries across the United States financed by steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie. As luck would have it, the officers discovered through their research that the site’s basement was home to the first headquarters of an Oxnard law enforcement official, the city marshal.

Wiley and Marostica tweaked and restyled their design over a period of months, bigger here, smaller there, before deciding on a badge centered on the Carnegie Museum with each officer’s city employment number and the Oxnard city seal.

Their fellow officers voted on the design, with 83% of the force’s 197 officers endorsing it. Many of them will buy their old badges as mementos, helping to offset the $15,000 cost of replacing them.

Wiley and Marostica allow that support for the new badges was not universal--the badge is a police officer’s most potent symbol, and no doubt some felt bonded to their old ones. But once the new badges arrive from their manufacturer in about a month, the force will have an inspection ceremony, officially decommissioning the old badge and commissioning the new.

This will be the first formal inspection ceremony Wiley has been through in his 21 years on the Oxnard force. A yearly event at such police forces as Simi Valley and Los Angeles, the ceremony provides a way to unify the officers.

“It has to do with discipline,” Wiley said. “If you see five officers wearing five different things, that leaves an impression on the public.”

And badges, of course, are a source of pride.

“The badge shows that this is more than just a job,” Marostica said. “It says what you do out there. Of everything I wear, this is most what I am.”

Lopez thinks of a police officer’s badge as a symbol of public trust.

Once, while tracking drug dealers on a stakeout in Los Angeles, he wore a scruffy street disguise of long hair and dirty clothes. Hoping to use a woman’s home as a vantage point, he showed her his police identification card. Not good enough, the woman said: She wanted to see a badge.

He flashed the badge, and she let him enter her house.

“She left me with her prized possession,” Lopez said. “And it’s all because of the power of the badge.”