Berkeley Police Association

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Berkeley Police Association The Berkeley Police ASSOCIATION (BPA) represents the 140 sworn members of the Berkeley Police Department. Click here to make a donation.

The Berkeley Police Association was founded in 1953 by the sworn officers of the Berkeley Police Department. The goal of the Berkeley Police Association is to partner with the community and provide quality police service through community interaction, emphasizing the highest degree of cooperation, professionalism and ethical behavior, and to create an atmosphere of safety and security. Our community policing approach helps neighborhoods keep safe by working with our police officers daily. We have proudly served the community of Berkeley for over 100 years. We are committed to not only the safety of our citizens and business but to providing charitable contributions to those in our community who need our help the most. Currently we are involved with the East Bay Humane Society, Special Olympics, the Wounded Warrior Project, the AIDS lifecycle ride, charitable organizations. For more information about the work we do in our communities please visit our Supported Charities page. To help us better serve you and our community we share, please feel free to join our mission by participating in any of our events or donating toward our cause. Thank you for your support and contributions

Sincerely,
Chris Stines, Berkeley PA President

Today is National Move Over Day. Only two in three drivers believe the law requires them to do anything special when the...
10/17/2026

Today is National Move Over Day. Only two in three drivers believe the law requires them to do anything special when they pass a stopped police car on the roadside.

That is from the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety's 2025 national survey. For tow trucks, it was 58 percent. And among drivers who did know the law applied, fewer than half knew it asks them to slow down, not just change lanes.

All 50 states have a move over law. Hawaii was the last to pass one, in 2012. The rule is simple: when you see flashing lights on the shoulder, move over a lane if you safely can. If you cannot, slow down well below the limit until you are past.

In 2025, 36 roadside responders were struck and killed by passing vehicles, according to the Emergency Responder Safety Institute. Law enforcement, fire and EMS crews, tow operators, road service and highway workers, all standing a few feet from traffic doing their jobs.

Members of this association work that shoulder. So do the tow drivers and road crews beside them.

Two visitors from Spain came to Berkeley as our guests. They walked our streets trusting that a city famous for its welc...
10/09/2026

Two visitors from Spain came to Berkeley as our guests. They walked our streets trusting that a city famous for its welcome would keep them safe. Instead, a driver struck them and fled, leaving them on the pavement. That act was cowardly, it was cruel, and it was criminal.

Let no one call this an accident. To strike a person may be a tragedy; to drive away is a choice. The driver who made that choice will be found, and will answer for it.

How long will we ask our officers to solve crimes like this one with only part of the tools they need? Oakland, Richmond, and the Alameda County Sheriff's Office give their investigators license plate readers, investigative cameras, or both. Berkeley's detectives still work half in the dark, and victims and their families pay the price.

The city must act: to complete the public safety technology procurement already underway, to bind every tool with strict limits on data retention, and to guard the privacy and civil liberties of every person in this city. Safety and liberty are not rivals. A city that cannot protect its guests cannot promise to protect its own.

To the families that visit Berkeley from all over the world : Berkeley stands with you, and Berkeley will not rest until justice is done.

The best conversations between a community and its police do not happen on a call. They happen over coffee.That is the e...
10/07/2026

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.

On the heels of yet another officer dropping their two week notice to join SFPD, we would like to extend a thanks to the...
09/30/2026

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 identi...
09/27/2026

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, s...
09/18/2026

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 Nat...
09/18/2026

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 t...
09/11/2026

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...
09/07/2026

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 Harva...
09/05/2026

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

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