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BAR-BAR-LEMON

Tue, 11/12/2002 - 13:02 — deadprogrammer

Ok, here is something that I can’t find an answer for on the Internet.

NYPD cops wear a badge. And badge identification is no mystery to me. It’s somewhat easy. Silver shield - uniform cop. Gold star shaped shield - detective. Spiky gold shield - captain. The one with an eagle and the word sergeant - you get the idea. Five stars on the shield? That’s the police commissioner himself. The one with Magen David on top - that’s the NYPD Rabbi.


See the full list of badges here.

Now, what I have trouble identifying is the so called citation bars.
For instance, here is a picture of my home precinct commanding officer, Captain William McClellan.

See the little color bars above his badge? Those are his awards.
They are kind of hard to decipher on the picture, but here is a list of them all.
The medals are easy to identify: they are detailed here. Service bars are no mystery as well.
But what I don’t understand is the flag bars, like the American Flag Bar, which I see most often.

Is that an award, or a commemorative bar, like the WTC bar? Is the same true about Afro - American Flag Bar, German Flag Bar, Italian Flag Bar and Irish Flag Bar? What is the EMS Delivery Bar? Is it given to cops, who helped deliver babies? What is “Aux” and what is “Aux Commendation” given for? What do those cool golden wings mean?

Questions, questions. I am afraid, I’ll have to ask a librarian to help me.

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Comments

Sat, 06/18/2005 - 22:35 — Sean (not verified)

HI,
I’m a police fan from Canada. I love the nypd badges with all the different bars above them. I’ve seen some officers with some pretty huge shields, sometimes like 12 or 15 bars! always different colours. The green ones seem to be the lower awards;pretty common. I’ve searched all over the internet for a page listing the different coloured bars and what they all stand for. I even tried writing the NYPD twice on their home page asking if they had some sort of publication or poster, but they wrote back that they get too many e-mails to handle personal replies. If you know where we can find some hidden info on this or anyone who will help us out, please send me an e-mail ‘cause I’m really interested too! :)

Best wishes from Canada!
 Sean


Sun, 06/19/2005 - 03:29 — deadprogrammer

Unfortunately the site which gave at least the name of citation bars is gone now. Luckily it still can be found in the cache at archive.org. You’ll need to give it some time to load the images.

Also, I found this newsgroup posting by someone who seems to know the citation bars well enough to identify them on TV cop show characters. You might email that person (you might need to get a google groups account for that).


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