Eagle photo/Stuart Villanueva

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The cars that Brazos County sheriff's deputies use to patrol the streets are now available to patrol the nation's floors.

Miniature models of the Brazos County Sheriff's Office patrol cars have been licensed by Mattel Inc. as nationally distributed Matchbox toys. The cars will be available in stores across the country until 2010.

"When they first contacted me [about licensing the cars' design] I didn't believe it," said Sheriff Chris Kirk, who initially thought he was being scammed by the designers. "We are really excited about it."

According to Mattel, the company's designers were researching patrol cars in 2007 for an upcoming design when they came across photos of the Brazos County Sheriff's Office vehicles on the Internet.

The company was looking to make toys out of Dodge police cruisers, and Brazos County was one of the first agencies with those cars in their fleet.

"That is one of the main reasons we partnered up with them," said Mattel spokeswoman Michele Sturdivant. "We wanted to have real-life police cars."

The county entered an agreement in February 2007 that allowed the company to use the cars' design for free. The county sent pictures to the designers, who replicated the vehicles' color, light bars and graphics, down to the "Brazos County" stenciled across the doors.

Ten months later, 65,000 small replicas of the county's Dodge Magnum patrol cars began to be shipped across the country.

"They have been distributed worldwide, but they are hard to find around here because our staff and family buy as many as they can as soon as they are available at Target or Wal-Mart," Kirk said.

Kirk said he has commissioned his friends and family from out of town to be on the lookout for them, and he recently bought a few of the cars off eBay.

Mattel officials recently told the sheriff's department that they plan to cast about 92,000 versions of the department's Dodge Charger cruisers in addition to the Magnum models that are already available. Those will be sold in a pack of five rescue vehicles.

And sheriff's deputies will no longer have to comb store aisles in search of the cars. The department acquired more than 2,200 of the toy cars from Mattel as part of the licensing agreement.

"All of our staff wants some, and we will use the rest of them for promotion and education," Kirk said.

• Matthew Watkins' e-mail address is matthew.watkins@theeagle.com.

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