New Braunfels Police Officers Association FOP Lodge #830

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

09/04/2026

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.