Berkeley Police Association

On the heels of yet another officer dropping their two week notice to join SFPD, we would like to extend a thanks to the four supportive council members votes in tonight’s special meeting! It’s getting harder and harder for your police department to retain and recruit officers when we’re not equipped with tools to do this increasingly difficult job. A tool like tear gas for our SRT, which every other SWAT team has, and every officer is trained and exposed to- in fear of actions at the federal level shows a lack of respect for the sanctity of life. No mental health workers co-responding with our officers(eliminated a first in the Country co-response model), no tear gas for the most critical situations, and we’re waiting to see what next! We deeply appreciate those who stand up for our shrinking police department!

George Vaughn Seibold was 23 years old, an aviator, and he was killed over France in 1918. His remains were never identified.

His mother, Grace Darling Seibold, spent the war visiting wounded servicemen in Washington hospitals, looking for her son among them and caring for the ones she found. She never got a grave to visit. What she did instead was find other mothers in the same position and refuse to let them sit alone with it.

On June 4, 1928, twenty five of those mothers met in Washington and founded American Gold Star Mothers, Inc. Congress granted the organization a federal charter in 1984. It is still operating today.

Gold Star Mother's and Family's Day is observed on the last Sunday in September, this year on the 27th. Congress set the date in 1936, and the President is asked each year to call on Americans to fly the flag in recognition.

A hundred and eight years after a telegram arrived at the Seibold house, the answer to it is still the one Grace found. You do not fix this for a family. You stay near them.

Share this post in their honor.

There is a POW/MIA flag flying at your post office right now. Federal law puts it there.

The National POW/MIA Flag Act, signed November 7, 2019, changed a rule most people never knew existed. Before it, the flag was required at federal sites on six days a year. Now it must fly on every day the American flag flies. At the Capitol. At the White House. At every national cemetery, every VA medical center, the World War II, Korean War and Vietnam Veterans memorials, and every post office in the country.

It is also the only flag other than the Stars and Stripes ever to fly over the White House.

The design came out of a request from Mrs. Michael Hoff, whose husband was missing in Vietnam, and was adopted by the National League of Families in January 1972. A silhouette, a strand of barbed wire, a watchtower, and four words. You Are Not Forgotten.

More than 80,000 Americans are still unaccounted for from past conflicts.

Members of this association pass that flag most days without looking up. Today is a good day to look.

Share this post in their honor.

The law that created the United States Air Force was signed in the air.

On July 26, 1947, President Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947 aboard his presidential aircraft, a Douglas VC-54C nicknamed the Sacred Cow. It was the first plane ever built specifically to fly a president. The act took effect on September 18, 1947, and the Air Force became a separate branch of the armed forces.

That same day, Stuart Symington was sworn in as its first Secretary. Carl Spaatz became its first Chief of Staff. A service built entirely around flight got its founding signature at altitude, which is either a coincidence or the best one in American military history.

Seventy nine years later the Sacred Cow is preserved at the National Museum of the United States Air Force, and the motto has not changed.

Several members of this association served in that uniform before they served this community.

Tag an Airman, past or present, who should see this today.

Aim High. Fly, Fight, Win.

On September 11, 2001, the Coast Guard put out a call on marine radio for all available boats.

Ferries answered. So did tugboats, dinner cruise boats, fishing charters, and private craft whose owners had no obligation to be anywhere near it. Lower Manhattan had no bridges open and no subways running. The only way off the island was the water.

In under nine hours they carried an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 people out. It remains the largest maritime evacuation in recorded history. Not one life was lost in the evacuation itself.

Most people do not know this happened. It is not in the footage everyone remembers. It was ordinary people with boats who heard a request and turned toward the smoke.

Twenty five years on, that is the part worth handing to whoever comes next. 2,977 people were killed that day, and thousands of others spent that morning deciding, without being asked twice, to go get somebody.

Every member of this association understands that decision. It is the same one they make on an ordinary Tuesday.

Share this post so someone who has never heard of the boat lift hears about it today.

Eighty one percent of private industry workers have access to paid holidays, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Which is another way of saying roughly one in five does not.

Labor Day did not arrive as a gift. The first one was September 5, 1882, in New York City. Congress made it a federal holiday on June 28, 1894, in the middle of the Pullman Strike.

The eight hour day took longer, and it did not arrive the way most people think. It was a demand for decades before Congress first wrote it into law, and even then only for interstate railroad workers, under the Adamson Act of 1916. The law most Americans actually work under today, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, does not cap your hours at all. It requires time and a half after forty in a week.

None of that was inevitable. Someone argued for every piece of it.

Members of this association will be on duty today, the way they are on most days the rest of the country has off.

Nine out of ten people who attempt su***de and survive do not go on to die by su***de later.

That figure comes from Harvard's Means Matter project, drawing on a review of ninety studies. It is worth sitting with, because of what it actually means. For most people the worst moment is not the permanent one. It passes. They go on.

September is National Su***de Prevention Month, and this is the month to say the difficult part plainly. Research from CNA and First H.E.L.P. documented 1,287 law enforcement and corrections personnel lost to su***de between 2016 and 2022, an average of roughly 184 a year.

Those numbers are not here to frighten anyone. They are here because a hazard that goes unnamed does not stop being a hazard.

Members of this association carry this alongside everything else the job asks of them. We would rather talk about it early than talk about it after.

If you are carrying something heavy right now, the odds are better than the moment feels.

Send this post to one person you have not checked on in a while.

***dePreventionMonth

When a disaster hits, the phone network does not fail evenly. Voice calls go first.

Here is why. A phone call holds an open channel for as long as you talk. A text message is a tiny packet that queues, retries, and slips through gaps a call cannot use. That is why the FCC's emergency guidance says plainly that in many cases text messages will go through when your call may not.

The second half of that guidance is the part almost nobody follows. Pick a contact who lives outside your area and make sure everyone in your household knows to check in with that person. When something happens locally, local lines jam. Long distance often still works. Your out of area contact becomes the switchboard while the neighborhood ones are useless.

September is National Preparedness Month. Two things, ten minutes, no shopping required. Agree on the out of area contact, and make sure everyone knows to text rather than call.

Our members work the days these plans get tested. The households that made one are noticeably easier to help.

Comment below with the one preparedness step you have actually done. Not the one you keep meaning to do.

Happy 110th birthday to the Marine Forces Reserve.

On August 29, 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Naval Appropriations Act, formally establishing the Marine Corps Reserve as World War I loomed and the country began preparing for the possibility of entering it.

Here is the growth curve: in April 1916, the Reserve consisted of 35 Marines. By the time Germany surrendered in November 1918, it had reached 6,467. Reserve Marines fought at Belleau Wood, Soissons, St. Mihiel, and Meuse-Argonne.

Today, Marine Forces Reserve is the largest command in the Marine Corps, with roughly 40,000 drilling Selected Reserve Marines across 184 Reserve Training Centers nationwide. They hold civilian careers and stay mission-ready at the same time.

Several members of this association do exactly that. Two commitments. One standard.

Semper Fidelis.

Please join the BPA for our 1st Annual Charity Golf Tournament. Family and friends and welcome to participate. All proceeds will go to support the Berkeley Humane Society.

For more information, and how to sign up please see the attached flyer.

There are still golf team spots and opportunities for tee sponsorship/recognition. Any support is welcomed.