LMPD challenge coins: Imagery equates officers to warriors, coins can spark controversy

An ancient Greek warrior with a spear emblazoned with the words “Best in the West.” Medallions showcasing Churchill Downs’ iconic twin spires.

An ancient Greek warrior with a spear emblazoned with the words “Best in the West.” Medallions showcasing Churchill Downs’ iconic twin spires. Police in riot gear standing in front of a burning Louisville skyline.

These are among the designs of collectible “challenge coins” that have been offered for sale to Louisville Metro Police officers through internal department-wide emails in recent years.

While widely circulated within the department, the challenge coins are largely unavailable to the broader public — except for some that end up being resold on the internet. Emails obtained by The Courier Journal under the Kentucky Open Records Act provide a glimpse at the collectibles officers are designing and purchasing. The tokens range from controversial — like the riot police one — to more mundane and offer a window into how members of the beleaguered department see themselves.

Challenge coins originally gained popularity in the military, but today they're a staple of American police culture.

“Traditionally, the challenge coin was something that was used among soldiers to commemorate either membership of a particular unit or being part of a particular operation or campaign. And that's very much how police use it,” said Michael Sierra-Arévalo, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of "The Danger Imperative: Violence, Death, and the Soul of Policing."

The coins are such a ubiquitous part of law enforcement culture that when Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman was the top federal prosecutor for the Western District of Kentucky, his office would tweet out images of the collectibles from across the commonwealth and nation as part of “#ChallengeCoinFriday.”

LMPD’s coins are largely designed by individual officers or groups of officers and advertised for sale inside the department. Sometimes, coins created by groups like the Louisville Metro Police Foundation are offered for sale.

From emails The Courier Journal reviewed, $10 is generally the standard price for a challenge coin, although special ones can cost more. LMPD coins resold online can sometimes go for many times that amount. The LMPD coin depicting the Greek warrior is currently listed at $65 plus shipping on eBay.

Imagery that evokes warriors is a shared theme among a number of LMPD’s coins. The Greek warrior coin, which was offered for sale in 2020, features a figure holding a spear while draped in a black, blue and white American flag. The coin was created for LMPD’s 2nd Division, which covers much of Louisville’s West End, a mostly Black section of the city with a disproportionate number of homicides compared to the rest of Louisville. The names of individual West End neighborhoods are written on the stripes of the flag, which is worn as a cape. “Best in the West” is written on the spear.

“This imagery that directly equates officers to warriors, soldiers, that are presumably fighting some enemy — that is something that’s relatively pervasive within policing,” said Sierra-Arévalo, who spent more than 1,000 hours on patrol with officers doing field research. At best, he added, that can look like police viewing themselves as sheepdogs; at worst, he said, that imagery takes on the form of the Punisher, the fictional Marvel Comics vigilante who uses extrajudicial force against criminals.

Another coin, for LMPD’s robbery unit, features a balaclava alongside one of the Ten Commandments: “thou shalt not steal.” On the other side, the fleur-de-lis of the LMPD logo is partially obscured by a red bandana hung in a way that mimics how a person would wear one across their face to hide their identity. Two downward-facing handguns straddle the sides of the fleur-de-lis.

Another coin for sale on eBay— which The Courier Journal did not see referenced in the emails obtained through open records — echoes that Biblical theme and portrays LMPD officers as God’s avengers.

“If you do evil — be afraid,” reads the Major Crimes Division coin. It then quotes the rest of Romans 13:4: “For we do not bear the sword in vain, we are ministers of god, agents of wrath to deliver vengeance to those who do evil.”

As first reported by LEO Weekly in 2022, a 2017 LMPD firearms training slideshow used that same Bible verse.

Sierra-Arévalo said there are “certainly” components of racial inequality and police taking a “good guys and bad guys” approach in challenge coin imagery, including ones The Courier Journal showed him. However, he believes images the public could potentially find problematic are created mostly out of ignorance.

“A lot of it is frankly driven by dudes doing stuff without thinking too hard about it,” he said. “It’s guys left to their own devices doing stuff that they think looks cool, and which gives them a sense of being cool, or high-speed, or super tactical. That also explains why soldiers do a lot of things … it’s an appeal towards masculinity and