By RAY RIVERA

Perhaps no tool in police work holds the legal or emotional significance of the badge, a few grams of nickel alloy that is covered by an insignia and a shield number. Badges are routinely handed down from father to child in police families. As rookies, officers are taught to guard them closely and generally to keep them on hand, on duty or off.

But in New York, a city that has become almost synonymous with high security, some officers don’t wear their badges on patrol.

Instead, they wear fakes.

Called “dupes,” short for duplicates, these phony badges are often just a trifle smaller than real ones but otherwise completely authentic. Officers use them because losing a real badge can mean paperwork and a heavy penalty, as much as 10 days’ pay.

Though fake badges violate department policy, they are a quirk deeply embedded in the culture and history of the New York Police Department. Estimates of how many of the city’s 35,000 officers use fake badges vary from several thousand to several hundred - roughly 25 officers are disciplined each year for using them - but the practice has become more sensitive since the September 11 attacks and the heightened concern about police impersonation.

“I remember learning about it back in 1965,” said a former chief of department, Louis R. Anemone, who retired in 1999. “I never used one, but I know some did.” Federal law prohibits the sale or purchase of counterfeit police badges. Many people suggest that the practice is on the wane, but when Congressman Anthony D. Weiner, a Democrat who represents parts of Brooklyn and Queens, pushed several years ago for tougher legislation on badge trafficking, he was visited by a police union official, he said. “I was given the impression that if we were not to include an exemption for police officers, it would jam up a lot of rank-and-file cops who do make copies of their own badges,” he recalled .

Former officers said they used to buy phony badges off the Internet or at police equipment stores, paying between $25 and $75, though several shops contacted said they did not sell such items. A few police veterans said they believed that many officers bought their second badges at a jewelry shop in Chinatown, near Police Headquarters. They did not want to name the store, however.

“Everybody knows where to go,” Mr. Anemone said.

In many other cities officers are allowed to have more than one badge, or do not get penalized for losing their badge if promptly reported.

Some officers have come to see that losing a dupe can bring its own set of headaches. One former officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he has family members on the force, said he came to realize that his fake badge, with his real shield number on it, was as much a potential liability as a real one.

“If you drop either one on the street,” he said, “and someone returns it to 1 Police Plaza, someone’s going to say, ‘Is this so and so’s shield?’ ”

Michael J. Palladino, the president of the city detectives’ union, said the use of duplicates was common 30 years ago. “But I think that whole mentality has changed,” he said.

Others disagree. Eliot Sash, 53, an actor who made badges for the movies and television, said many of his best customers were New York City police officers.

“I had friends in all the different precincts and they’d call me and I’d go down and meet them in the squad room,” he said. “I’d just walk right in and they’d say, ‘There’s the badge man.’ Everyone knew me.”




Losing a police badge can cost 10 days’ pay, so many officers carry fakes. A real badge, top, and a dupe. / DAMON WINTER/THE NEW YORK TIMES