Crime & Safety
St. Pete Police to Wear Locally Designed Tribute Badges in Honor of Fallen Officers
At Friday's Memorial Service, Nathan Yarusso will present a first-of-its-kind tribute badge to the St. Petersburg Police Department.
ST. PETERBURG - The St. Petersburg Police Department will become the first U.S. police agency to pin officers with custom-designed tribute badges they will wear each May to remember their fallen comrades.
At a special awards ceremony today for St. Petersburg police, artist-entrepreneur Nathan Yarusso will present the badges to the department.
"It is an amazing feeling" said Yarusso, whose father is a retired Tallahassee cop. "The badge could not symbolize a more meaningful cause."
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A grief-stricken St. Petersburg is still feeling the pain from the loss of three officers fatally shot in 2011: Sgt. Thomas Baitinger, K-9 Officer Jeffrey Yaslowitz and Patrol Officer David Crawford.
A black band is traditionally worn over a badge to symbolize the loss of an officer in the line of duty. But Yarusso's design molds the black band into the badge design . The St. Petersburg Police Department is the first police agency to accept and wear tribute badges in place of their regular badges.
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It is a tradition that starts today and will take place every May.
The deaths of the officers changed the city forever, some say, but there also has been an outpouring of support.
The shooting deaths of the St. Pete officers hit close to home for Yassuro, who owns a St. Petersburg company whose primary clients are police agencies. "I was in total shock," explained Yarusso.
Yarusso is a 30-year old entrepreneur who runs Scotland Yard Design Concepts, at 1221 69th St. North, in St. Petersburg. The national company designs and develops logos, badges, insignia, vehicle graphics and patches for public safety agencies.
When the shootings happened, Yassuro said, "I wanted to use my business to do a tribute design for them."
Yassuro and his business partner, Sgt. Jeremy Pilone of Miami Gardens, began work on the tribute badge as soon as they conceived the idea.
They had a lot of help from the SPPD command staff. Yarusso explained the dynamics of the design. "This is a design that has been worn for more than 100 years," he said. "I added the American flag and a blue and black band around the middle."
The black band is worn to signify a fallen officer, while the blue is the "thin blue line" that law enforcement represents between civil society and anarchy.
