cuffs

I broke my collarbone about a week ago. I bought my eldest a cheap LEGO set to work on as one afternoon's alternative to climbing all over my broken body.

The set is nice. Police helicopter. Ten bucks. We got a bonus. The set included an extra set of handcuffs. I dodged an uncomfortable question with dishonesty and explained that they were open ended offset wrenches and that helicopters require a LOT of maintenance. That's half right anyway. Handcuffs were not part of my childhood LEGO experience.

LEGO furnishes buyers with amazing detailed inventories of each set along with part numbers for each piece. These manifests dramatically simplify the work of LEGO archivists and salvage dealers. My handcuffs, part 61482, Light Bluish Gray Minifig Utensil Handcuffs, appear in fifty LEGO sets issued between 2008 and 2013 according to the scribes at BrickLink. That seems like a lot.

LEGO handcuffs
Image credit BrickLink.com

What is going on in Denmark? Wikipedia reports a 24 percent rise in break-ins and home robberies in Denmark between 2009 and 2011. Perhaps latent Danish insecurity is playing out here for our kids. It's not our crime. US crime totals have declined every year since 2002 and in 2011 were at their lowest rate per capita since 1967. These handcuffs are not for Americans. They are a trifle small for our fatter wrists in any case.

LEGO has been building police sets for a long time. My first brush with law enforcement was at Police Headquarters -- set 588. The four included minifigs, a helicopter pilot and a motorcycle cop among them, took me down with nothing more than two handheld radios (part 3962a).

In total, LEGO had released 139 police-themed sets since 1956. 33% (46) of those sets have been issued since 2008. Overall, LEGO has released about ten thousand five hundred sets since 1956. A less frantic 23% (2385) have been issued in since 2008. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. A plastic police state is on the rise.

Is this universal? Pan-European? Is this simply a concession to emerging totalitarian markets? Across the border with Germany, Playmobil walks the thin blue line with 136 police-themed sets out of 3814 sets total since 1974 according to PlaymoDB. While Playmobil has a higher total fraction of police over its run with 3.6% versus LEGO at 1.3%, they have not tracked along with LEGO's recent explosion/crackdown. Germany's rate of home invasion has also risen in recent years though the Danish rate increase outstrips it.

Don't miss next week's double issue: The psychological impact of Somali piracy revealed in toys AND clinical use of injection molding sprue as a tactile complement to Rorschach testing.