Irvine Police Athletics and Wellness Association

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

In 1917, an Army captain named Robert Queisser designed a small flag for a window.He had two sons serving overseas. The ...
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.

Last year, 231 missing Americans came home.That is the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency's fiscal year 2025 count. 165 f...
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.

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.

This year, for the first time, there will be a seventh moment of silence.At the ceremony marking twenty five years since...
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.

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

When a disaster hits, the phone network does not fail evenly. Voice calls go first.Here is why. A phone call holds an op...
09/03/2026

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.

110 years ago, the Marine Corps Reserve was created for a war the United States had not entered yet.President Woodrow Wi...
08/29/2026

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 p...
08/15/2026

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.

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PO BOX 14682
Irvine, CA
92623

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