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Theories for the origin of cop abound, including the copper badge explanation you mention. We'd always been under the impression that the term was an acronym for "constable on patrol." Well, it seems we're both mistaken, as we learned from our roundabout quest for the answer. A simple Yahoo! search on "cop" returned many relevant categories, but we came up empty after checking sites in several categories. We decided to narrow our probe by searching for "origin of cop" (using quotation marks around the term). We weren't expecting much, but when one of the results turned out to be a page from the Merriam-Webster
Dictionary we clicked hopefully. What we found was basically an advertisement for the Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories. At first we were disappointed, but then we realized why this page had appeared in the search results -- the word "cop" was one of the sample entries. Around the year 1700, the slang verb cop entered English usage, meaning "to get ahold of, catch, capture." By 1844, cop showed up in print, and soon thereafter the -er suffix was added, and a policeman became a copper, one who cops or catches and arrests criminals. Copper first appeared in print in 1846, the use of cop as a short form copper
occured in 1859. To confirm the findings on Merriam Webster's promotional page we tried the same "origin of cop" search on Google, which lead us Michael Quinion's World Wide Words column on the same subject.
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