National Night Out

This Tuesday, Carrington is one of 17 communities across North Dakota hosting National Night Out events.

The National Night Out program celebrates its 40th year of connecting law enforcement with the broader community.

It all began with Matt, a volunteer with the Lower Merion Community Watch in the western suburbs of Philadelphia, Penn. in 1970.

As one of a thousand volunteers in his area program, he prepared a newsletter to keep his colleagues informed about what was happening, and he learned that there were hundreds of other such volunteer groups throughout the country, all looking for similar resources and connections.

He established the National Association of Town Watch in 1981 as a result. Neighbors and local law enforcement across the nation supported the association as it steadily grew for the next three years.

In 1984, NATW hosted the first-ever National Night Out. The event involved 2.5 million neighbors across 400 communities in 23 states.

In the decades since, National Night Out has grown to become a celebration beyond just front porch vigils and symbolic efforts amongst neighbors to send a message of neighborhood camaraderie.

“The best way to build a safer community is to know your neighbors and your surroundings. National Night Out triumphs over a culture that isolates us from each other and allows us to rediscover our own communities,” according to former Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas.

The 40-year-old program now has 17,000 participating communities across all 50 states.

Here in central North Dakota, Minnewaukan, Devils Lake and Jamestown will also observe National Night Out this Tuesday.

Kudos to the Carrington Police Department (CPD) for continuing this fantastic community event, and thanks to the sponsors who provide the financial and other support to make it possible. It is yet another example of how our community comes together in a positive way.

Even last year, in the wake of the sudden death of their chief, Brandon Sola, the CPD carried on and planned the National Night Out. The planning was led by Officer Liz Kapp.

In my role as a community journalist, it’s important for me and my staff to have a good relationship with local law enforcement. We respect the work that they do, and they provide us important details so that we can keep the public informed about what’s happening in our communities.

For instance, in both the Transcript and Independent this week, reporter Nathan Price breaks down the new traffic laws going into effect Aug. 1, including the primary seatbelt law. This is a newsworthy story that Eddy County Sheriff Paul Lies approached me about on July 4. The men and women of law enforcement are here to serve and protect us, and in this case the sheriff wanted to first educate the community before taking enforcement action.

Five years after the first National Night Out, the television series “Cops” debuted on the Fox network on March 11, 1989.

It took a writers’ strike to get Cops on the air. Cops was created by John Langley and Malcolm Barbour, who tried unsuccessfully for several years to get a network to carry the program. The Fox network picked up the low-budget concept in the midst of the 1988 Writers Guild of America strike, mainly because it had no union writers.

Now, 35 years later, we are in the middle of yet another screenwriters strike, and the actors have joined them on the picket line.

There has been a lot of controversy over the years about the arrests depicted in the show, and many see “Cops” as an example of police brutality. As a rural North Dakota kid, I watched it through a slightly different lens.

The show was temporarily canceled in 2020 amid nationwide protests against police brutality and racial injustice after the death of George Floyd while in Minneapolis police custody. The show was revitalized by Fox Nation in 2021, and the show is currently in its 35th season with new episodes released by the streaming service every Friday.

When I was growing up, our small town USA interactions with cops usually consisted of being told to slow down when we got caught speeding, or ripping our pants trying to scale a fence to get away from a party that had been busted.

The television show gave me a closer look at what happens in other areas of the country, places I had never experienced. I remember tuning in every week in my preteen years, glued to the screen.

We rooted for the cops to get the bad guy, then turned the channel to watch “Smokey and the Bandit” or “Dukes of Hazzard” and cheered for the main characters as they fled from the officers. “It’s just fiction, we told ourselves.” “In the real world, the true bad guys always get caught.”

Yet, we still grew up understanding that law enforcement officers were there to protect and serve us.

Now, as a journalist, I hear about all kinds of scary situations in our rural communities. Yes, there were murders and drug busts and all that when I was a kid. But now I’m hearing about them in the courtroom and poring over formal complaints filed with the court, trying to write the “story” in a way to give readers context without jumping to conclusions.

We still say “John Doe is innocent unless proven guilty” at the end of our articles about alleged criminal activity in our communities, just like they said on every episode of “Cops.”

And we will be right there to publish the acquittals as well as the convictions, because a person found “not guilty” by a jury is just as newsworthy as a plea agreement or conviction and subsequent sentence from a judge.

National Night Out is an opportunity to get our kids in front of police officers and have a chance to see that they are also human. It is an environment where we can continue to build healthy relationships between law enforcement officers and the communities they serve.

Buckle your seatbelts, folks, and join us in Carrington City Park on Tuesday.