City

Police Station

A busy, kid-first police HQ built around one gloriously silly exploding cell.

Brick Rated Score

3.7/5

Set 60246 · 2020

Pieces743

Minifigs6

Year2020

Set number60246

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The verdict

This is the LEGO City police station as pure play machine, and on that measure it delivers.

The jailbreak wall that pops open when you flick a lever is the whole personality of the set, and my inner eight-year-old lit right up the first time it blew. It is not the detailed, deep station AFOLs remember from a few years back, so if you want a display piece you will feel the compromise. But for a child who watches LEGO City Adventures, this is a genuinely fun afternoon.

Best for: Kids aged 5-10 who love the LEGO City Adventures characters and want a station that actually does something

The full review

What it is

The Police Station (60246) is the 2020 centerpiece of LEGO City's police lineup, a 743-piece headquarters built squarely around play rather than shelf appeal. What got me was the jailbreak function. You flick a lever and a whole section of the cell wall bursts outward, sending the prisoner scrambling and every kid in the room shrieking. It is the kind of feature that makes a set a story engine instead of a static model, and LEGO clearly knew it, because the searchlight tower has a light brick and the police car has a siren sound brick to match. Add the two dogs and the six minifigures, three of them lifted straight from the LEGO City Adventures TV show, and you have a set that is practically begging to be knocked over and rebuilt.

The catch

I will be straight with you about where it stops short. Ninety-nine dollars for 743 pieces is on the steep side, and a chunk of that budget clearly went to the battery bricks and play mechanisms rather than raw part count. The station itself is a set of fairly boxy rooms without much interior richness, and if you loved the older police stations with their layered detail and heftier footprint, you are going to feel the trade. This is a wide, open, swooshable building, not a dense little diorama. Reviewers with older kids and adult eyes tended to note the same thing: the build is simple, the rooms are square, and the charm lives almost entirely in the features rather than the architecture.

Who it's for

So who lands on the happy side of this? A child in roughly the 5-to-10 range, especially one who knows Duke DeTain and Daisy Kaboom from the show, is going to get real hours out of it. The vehicle spread alone (car, truck, motorcycle, drone) keeps the play moving, and that exploding cell never gets old. Who should skip it? Adult collectors chasing a detailed display station, or anyone counting cost per piece, will do better elsewhere or on the secondary market. Now that it is retired, prices have crept up toward and past the original RRP, so if you want it for a kid, grab it for the play value and not as an investment.

The parts story

What the build is actually like, and the pieces worth knowing about.

The build itself is quick and friendly, which is exactly the point. This is aimed at kids from five up, so the instructions are clean, the sections come together fast, and the trickiest moment is rigging the spring-loaded jail wall so it launches properly. Adults will breeze through it in an evening and mostly enjoy watching the play features click into place. Younger builders get that satisfying pace where a whole vehicle appears in a few pages, then the tower, then the exploding cell as the finale. It is engineered for momentum, not for teaching advanced technique.

On standout parts, the real value here is figures rather than rare elements. Six minifigures plus two dog moulds is a strong head count for a City set, and pulling Chief Wheeler, Duke DeTain and Daisy Kaboom out of the box is a treat for anyone who watches the show. The functional pieces carry the rest of the weight: a light brick in the searchlight and a sound brick in the police car, both running off the included CR1216 coin cells. You will not find a hoard of new moulds or fancy printed tiles to harvest, so as a parts pack it is ordinary. As a bundle of ready-to-play characters and mechanisms, it earns its keep.

Fun facts

01The set retired in September 2021 after only about 20 months on shelves, giving it a fairly short retail life for a City flagship.
02Both the searchlight light brick and the police car siren sound brick run on a 1xCR1216 coin cell, and LEGO included the batteries in the box.
03Three of the minifigures, Duke DeTain, Chief Wheeler and Daisy Kaboom, are pulled directly from the LEGO City Adventures TV series.
04It launched at a 99.99 dollar RRP, and sealed copies now tend to sit right around or above that price on the secondary market.