Ithaca Police Benevolent Association

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Ithaca Police Benevolent Association The Ithaca PBA is the not for profit organization that represents Ithaca's law enforcement professionals.

Today is National Move Over Day. Flashing lights on the shoulder mean one thing: move over.If you can safely change lane...
10/17/2026

Today is National Move Over Day. Flashing lights on the shoulder mean one thing: move over.

If you can safely change lanes away from a stopped emergency vehicle, tow truck or road crew, do it. If you cannot, slow down, well below the posted limit, until you are past. That is the law in all 50 states.

It is also a law a lot of drivers do not fully know. In the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety's 2025 survey, fewer than half of drivers who knew the law applied realized it also means slowing down. More than two thirds thought drivers who ignore it are unlikely to be caught.

The cost of that gap is measured in people. The Emergency Responder Safety Institute counted 36 roadside responders struck and killed in 2025, and at least 26 more so far in 2026.

Saturday, October 17 is National Move Over Day. Our members will be on the shoulder that day, same as every day.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

There is a persistent myth that asking someone directly whether they are thinking about su***de will put the idea in the...
09/05/2026

There is a persistent myth that asking someone directly whether they are thinking about su***de will put the idea in their head.

The research says the opposite. A review published in Psychological Medicine examined the available studies and found not one showing that asking about suicidal thoughts increased them. The authors concluded that acknowledging and talking about su***de may in fact reduce suicidal ideation.

September is National Su***de Prevention Month, and that finding is the most useful thing anyone can hand you this month, because it removes the reason most people stay quiet.

It matters in this line of work more than most. The CDC's National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health has reported that law enforcement personnel and firefighters are more likely to die by su***de than in the line of duty.

That makes this a safety issue. This association treats safety issues the way it treats every other one. Out loud.

You do not need a certification to ask a colleague how they are actually doing. You need to ask, and then stay quiet long enough to get the real answer.

Share this post so it reaches someone who has been sitting on that question.

***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.

Happy 110th birthday to the Marine Forces Reserve.On August 29, 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Naval Appropri...
08/29/2026

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.

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120 E Clinton Street
Ithaca, NY
14850

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