John Wareham/News
Many different departments and first responder groups came to Fredericktown for National Night Out on Tuesday night, including Fredericktown police, EMS and fire, the Knox County Sheriff and several K9 units.
FREDERICKTOWN — First responders from all over the county gathered in Fredericktown for the annual National Night Out event that took up much of the village’s square Tuesday night.
The event happened in towns all over the country, all at the same time, and is celebrated everywhere on the first Tuesday in August. It is designed to bring together law enforcement and citizens to unify and be more comfortable with each other so that the relationship between the two groups stays loose, casual and helpful.
The celebration featured emergency personnel walking throughout the area while given out prizes and showing demonstrations of their equipment or judging a car show.
“Events like this are going on in communities like this throughout the entire nation,” said Fredericktown Police Lt. Kyle Johnson. “The main concept of it is to raise crime prevention awareness and to bring the community together, build neighborhood camaraderie, build community partnerships to ultimately to raise crime prevention awareness.”
The Fredericktown Police Department has been actively trying to interact with the community more often so not only the community feels safe in general, but also feels comfortable enough to call in and report anything they feel might be suspicious.
“We want the public to be able to feel comfortable communicating with the police,” Johnson said. “We don’t know about issues in the neighborhoods unless they (the people) tell us. We can only be one set of eyes at any given place at a time.”
The event was like a mini street fair, with booths, food, raffles and live music. Emergency services groups either manned booths, gave out information, showed off cars or trucks or walked around the crowd.
“It’s hard to quantify the effect that this has (on the community) in regards to improvement. One thing that I can tell you is that we can quantify that we have seen since we started this — the neighborhood watch group. Since we started the neighborhood watch group, we’ve seen an increase in the volume of our calls. We look at that as a good thing because one of the things we teach our neighborhood watch group is how to report crime,” Johnson said. “To not be concerned about reporting something that’s suspicious. We encourage them to call us and let us know the problem.”
Johnson was the lead MC of the evening and announced the winners of all of the raffles and drawings and even had children help him draw the winning tickets. It was all in the name of positive reinforcement.
“I can’t tell you how many times I have heard this. Years ago, and I haven’t heard it so much in the last few years, since we started the neighborhood watch group is that people say like they’ll see something and then report it to us a few days later. The reply that we constantly heard was ‘We don’t want to bother you. It didn’t seem that big.’ But what may not seem that big may be a big piece of a puzzle that we’re trying to put together for later. The sooner we can get that report, the better,” Johnson said.
One of the elements of the night was a small car show and Chris Cline, Mike Page and Mike Allen won awards for their vehicles from the firefighters, the EMS and the police respectively.
