Badge Heist at BPD

There are plenty of jokes among the Boston cops about dummies with badges. But today all the talk was about dummies without badges, after a Lexington man was busted for trying to sell two BPD shields lifted from mannequins set up in the lobby of the department’s troubled evidence warehouse in Hyde Park.

“Boy,” says one department veteran, “the real dummies on this job are keeping their badges, but the ones that aren’t breathing are losing theirs.”

The badges were reported stolen from the Boston Central Supply Unit on Friday after a cop noticed that the “uniformed mannequins in the lobby of 1555 Hyde Park Avenue” had been stripped of a captain’s badge and a patrol officer’s badge, according to a police report obtained by Boston Daily.

Robert Turner, 35, of Lexington was busted yesterday after someone flagged down a cop and told him that there was a man near the Park Street station trying to sell Boston Police badges. The cop approached Turner as he talked on his cell phone and asked about the badges. “I found them,” Turner claimed. “I found them in front of Citizens Bank.”

As it turned out, he might have been telling the truth. Despite the intense, around-the-clock security of the evidence warehouse – part of a massive investigation targeting cops who stole drugs and replaced them with fake narcotics – a suspect picking up personal property at the site was captured on security video stealing the badges from the dummies.

The dummies, by the way, were set up in the lobby to remind cops to look professional in their uniforms.

“The incident remains under investigation,” says BPD spokeswoman Elaine Driscoll. “However, we have identified a person of interest who recently had gone to central supply to pick up found property.”

Citizens can access a lobby area of the building to pick up belongings that may have been seized after an arrest.