Gilroy Police Officers' Association

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.

10/07/2026

National Coffee with a Cop Day started with a simple problem. Most people only ever met the police on the worst day of their week.

In 2011, Chief Keith Kauffman and John Dixon of the Hawthorne Police Department in California tried something different. They set up at a local coffee shop, with no agenda and no speeches, and let residents walk up and ask whatever they wanted. By 2016 the idea had spread to all 50 states.

It is now held on the first Wednesday of October every year, which this year is October 7.

The format has not changed, because it does not need to. A table, a cup of coffee, and time to talk about the things that never come up during a call. Parking. School traffic. Why the sirens were out on Tuesday night.

Members of this association know the most useful conversations rarely happen in an emergency.

10/02/2026

09/27/2026

In 1917, an Army captain named Robert Queisser designed a small flag for a window.

He had two sons serving overseas. The flag he patented carried a blue star for each family member in service, and families across the country began hanging them where neighbors could see. It was a quiet way of saying that someone from this house is out there.

If that person did not come home, the family sewed a gold star over the blue one.

That is where the term comes from. Not a medal. Not a designation handed down by an institution. A mother with a needle, covering a blue star, in a window on an ordinary street. In 1918 the practice was formalized when the Women's Committee of the Council of National Defense asked President Wilson to approve a gold star for mothers who had lost a child in the war, and he did.

Gold Star Mother's and Family's Day is observed on the last Sunday in September, this year on the 27th.

Members of this association know Gold Star families in the communities we serve. Most of them will not say so out loud.

If you know one, they do not need a speech. They need to know their person is still remembered by name. Share this post in their honor.

09/18/2026

The Gilroy POA sponsored a team to support our neighbors over in Watsonville at their annual Watsonville PAL Golf Tournament. Watsonville Police Activities League (PAL)

09/18/2026

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.

09/18/2026

When the Air Force became its own branch on September 18, 1947, it did not have a uniform of its own.

For years afterward its people wore Army olive drab with new insignia. A brand new service, dressed in its old parent's clothes. Air Force Materiel Command's own history calls 1947 through 1954 the transition period. The blue everyone recognizes now had to be invented from scratch.

The falcon came later too. Cadets of the Class of 1959 chose it as the Academy mascot on September 25, 1955, for its speed, power, courage and agility. The Academy still keeps live falcons, cared for by the cadet falconry team.

Seventy nine years on, a service that started out borrowing its clothes flies 4,865 aircraft across the active force, the Air National Guard and the Reserve.

Some of our own members wore that uniform first. They tend to mention it.

Happy birthday to the United States Air Force. Drop a blue heart in the comments if you or someone you love served in it.

09/11/2026

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.

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.

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