Nine-year-old Jasmine Eggleston right, receives her door prize ticket and free T-shirt from National Night Out volunteer Rosie Johnson Tuesday evening as she enters the gate to the City Park Pavilion.(Brian Loden The VIcksburg Post)

[8/4/04]Last year, Leah Sullivan’s Vicklan Street neighborhood experienced a rash of burglaries. But after a day and a half, the Vicksburg Police Department rounded up the youths responsible.

Tuesday night, Sullivan joined about 120 residents in showing solidarity against crime and support for their police department by attending National Night Out at City Park Pavilion. The three-hour event started at 6.

The event, part of a nationwide program designed to unite citizens against crime, featured a two-mile walk, raffles and booths offering safety information. Citizens were asked to leave their porch lights on to show their support for the event.

Sullivan, who has lived in Vicksburg for 20 years, said she was pleased with her city’s police force.

“Whenever I’ve called, they’ve always been there,” Sullivan said. “They do a fantastic job.”

Police Chief Tommy Moffett said a big part of the event was simply giving the community an opportunity to interact with police outside of an official setting.

“The whole idea is to draw the community together,” Moffett said. “The criminal element is a minority. Most people care about community and good neighborhoods and schools.”

Cameron Smith, a 13-year-old student at Vicksburg Junior High, is the son of a police officer, Nichelle Smith. He said seeing the officers in a casual setting helps his friends who don’t have parents in uniform feel comfortable with police officers.

“They are people you can go to for help,” Smith said.

Michele Bailey said she appreciates the police presence in her Fairground Street neighborhood.

“We see (police cruisers) all the time,” Bailey said.

Bailey said she thinks community relations with the police department are as good as they’ve been during the 37 years she’s lived in Vicksburg.

One part of the event caught her off-guard, though.

“I didn’t know we were going to be walking,” Bailey said as she pushed her niece in a stroller through the early evening heat. “But it’s for a good cause.”

National Night Out is intended nationally to be just that. In past years, up to 32 million people nationwide have participated in nearly 10,000 communities by leaving on lights and going to neighborhood get-togethers.

For more than 10 years in Vicksburg, now-retired police Officer Doug Arp took a week’s vacation to draw attention some national to the night with stunts that included living for a week in a trash receptacle, on a billboard, in a decorative water fountain, suspended in a car and in a hole in the ground.

In some of those years, thousands of local residents turned out for the street parties and other get-togethers on National Night Out, which culminated Arp’s weeklong stunts.