Butte Police Protective Association

The best conversations between a community and its police do not happen on a call. They happen over coffee.

That is the entire premise of National Coffee with a Cop Day, held on the first Wednesday of October, which this year falls on October 7. It started in Hawthorne, California in 2011 and has since been held in all 50 states and in countries around the world.

No speeches. No agenda. Just a chance to ask the questions that never fit into a traffic stop or a report: what the new sign on the corner means, how to report something without calling 911, what the job is actually like.

The members of this association are neighbors first. Most of them will tell you the coffee is the easy part. The listening is what matters.

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.

Last year, 231 missing Americans came home.

That is the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency's fiscal year 2025 count. 165 from World War II, 58 from Korea, 8 from Vietnam. It was a record, and the first time since 2019 the agency exceeded the 200 identifications Congress asks of it.

It also barely moved the number. More than 80,000 Americans are still unaccounted for from past conflicts. Roughly 38,000 of them are assessed as recoverable. Most of the rest were lost at sea.

Those two facts sit together uncomfortably, and they should. The work is painstaking, it is slow, and it is still producing results eighty years after the fact. Somewhere last year, 231 families got a phone call they had stopped expecting.

Today is National POW/MIA Recognition Day, observed every year on the third Friday in September by presidential proclamation.

The flag says You Are Not Forgotten. The 231 is the proof.

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.

This year, for the first time, there will be a seventh moment of silence.

At the ceremony marking twenty five years since September 11, 2001, the six moments the country knows will be observed. The two towers struck, the two towers fallen, the Pentagon, and Flight 93. Then, after the reading of the names, a seventh will be added for those who have died of 9/11 related illness. The 9/11 Memorial and Museum has said it will be a permanent part of the ceremony from now on.

It was added because the arithmetic finally demanded it. 2,977 people from 90 nations were killed that day, among them 441 first responders from more than thirty agencies. 343 FDNY members. 37 from the Port Authority Police Department. 23 from the NYPD.

In the years since, more than 400 FDNY members have died of World Trade Center related illness. More than died on the day itself.

Twenty five years is long enough that a generation now learns this as history. It is not history to the people still being buried from it.

Share this post in their honor.

Nobody is entirely sure who invented Labor Day, and the two leading candidates had nearly the same name.

The Department of Labor lays out both cases without picking a winner. Peter J. McGuire, a carpenter and co-founder of the American Federation of Labor, is the traditional answer. But the Department notes that recent research seems to support Matthew Maguire, a machinist from Paterson, New Jersey. McGuire and Maguire. A holiday celebrated for more than 140 years, and the credit is still open.

What is settled: the first Labor Day was Tuesday, September 5, 1882, in New York City. By the time Congress made it federal on June 28, 1894, thirty one states had already made it a holiday on their own. The country adopted this one from the bottom up.

Today most people get the day. Not everyone does. Our members are working it, along with the nurses, the line crews, the dispatchers, and everyone else whose job does not observe a Monday in September.

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

The 72 hour emergency kit is out of date.

The current federal guidance does not give you a number of days at all. It says one gallon of water per person per day, plus non perishable food, for several days. The vagueness is deliberate. Three days was always a planning convenience, not a promise about how long you would be on your own.

Here is where most households actually stand, according to FEMA's 2024 National Household Survey. Sixty nine percent have assembled emergency supplies. Only forty two percent have an emergency plan.

The supplies are the easy half. The plan is the half that decides whether the supplies are any use.

And a plan is not complicated. Where do we meet. Who do we call. Who gets the kids. What happens to the dog. Ten minutes at a kitchen table puts you ahead of most of the country.

Our members would rather knock on a door where that conversation already happened.

If you already have a plan, comment below with the one thing yours includes that most people forget.

110 years ago, the Marine Corps Reserve was created for a war the United States had not entered yet.

President Woodrow Wilson signed the Naval Appropriations Act on August 29, 1916. The logic was simple: if America was pulled into World War I, it would need trained Marines ready to move without months of lead time. Congress built the Reserve to guarantee that.

It worked. Reserve Marines went on to serve in every major American conflict since, from Belleau Wood to Iraq and Afghanistan, alongside disaster response, humanitarian missions, and community work like Toys for Tots.

Today it is the largest command in the Marine Corps, roughly 40,000 drilling Marines strong, made up of people balancing full civilian lives with full military readiness.

Members of this association do the same thing every week. We know exactly what that takes.

Share this post to recognize 110 years of Reserve Marines.

Twenty minutes. That is roughly how long a kid spends walking to school and walking home again, and it is the riskiest part of their entire day.

NHTSA data shows more school-age pedestrians are killed between 6 and 8 in the morning and between 3 and 5 in the afternoon than during any other hours. Two narrow windows, at the exact times when the light is bad, drivers are rushed, and children are the smallest and hardest things on the road to see.

Here is what actually helps. Walk the route with them once before the first day so they know where to cross rather than deciding in the moment. Teach them to make eye contact with a driver before stepping off a curb, because a stopped car is not the same thing as a driver who has seen you. Bright colors on a backpack do more than people think in morning fog. And the phone goes in the pocket until they are through the door.

None of it takes long. All of it works.

Our members will be out on those routes when school starts back up, same as always.

Share this post before Monday morning. Someone on your feed is walking a kid to school for the first time this week.