Torrance Police Officers' Association

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Torrance Police Officers' Association

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Incorporated on February 18, 1950, is a non-profit organization, dedicated to over 200 police officers serving the City of Torrance.

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.

10/02/2026

Answer the call.

📸: Carlos

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.

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

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.

09/07/2026

Nobody is entirely sure who invented Labor Day, and the two leading candidates had nearly the same name.

The Department of Labor lays out both cases without picking a winner. Peter J. McGuire, a carpenter and co-founder of the American Federation of Labor, is the traditional answer. But the Department notes that recent research seems to support Matthew Maguire, a machinist from Paterson, New Jersey. McGuire and Maguire. A holiday celebrated for more than 140 years, and the credit is still open.

What is settled: the first Labor Day was Tuesday, September 5, 1882, in New York City. By the time Congress made it federal on June 28, 1894, thirty one states had already made it a holiday on their own. The country adopted this one from the bottom up.

Today most people get the day. Not everyone does. Our members are working it, along with the nurses, the line crews, the dispatchers, and everyone else whose job does not observe a Monday in September.

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

Address

Torrance, CA
90501

Telephone

(310) 325-8762

Website

http://www.torrancepoa.com/

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