The 26th annual National Night Out, a safety carnival held Tuesday at Patriarche Park, 1100 Alton Road, included information and entertainment about safety for adults and kids. One popular event was East Lansing police Chief Tom Wibert stationed in a dunk tank.
As East Lasing native Allison Foster sat at a picnic table with her sons Connor, 7, and Cole, 8, a motorcycle cop revved up his engine only feet away.
This wasn’t any scene of a crime, it was the 26th annual National Night Out, a safety carnival held on Tuesday at Patriarche Park, 1100 Alton Road.
“We got to go in the (fire) truck and the ambulance,” Connor said.
Allison Foster, who now lives in northern Virginia, happened upon the carnival but decided to stay when she and her sons saw all of the police and fire equipment, including Sparrow Hospital’s LifeNet helicopter.
“What little boy doesn’t love a helicopter?” she said.
The carnival was put on by the Kiwanis Club, Target, the East Lansing Police Department and the East Lansing Fire Department to raise awareness about safety.
Festivities included access to police and fire vehicles, a dunk tank with East Lansing police Chief Tom Wibert and an inflatable moonbounce. The Kiwanis Club served free hot dogs, pop and chips to residents in the Patriarche Park pavilion.
“We’re treating the kids,” East Lansing resident Ernamarie Messenger said while grilling some hot dogs.
The Kiwanis Club has volunteered at the carnival for many years, East Lansing resident Barbara Hollstein said.
“It’s just really nice to see the families come out,” she said. “What’s fun is to see a lot of kids.”
With all of the activities for children, officers also incorporated ways to educate residents about safety and also introduce themselves to children.
“(Officers) are kind of scary to some (children),” East Lansing jail officer Amanda Tucker said. “But we show them that they are friendly.”
Parents, like Haslett resident Krista Fiero, took her friend Pam Kilbourne, of Saint Clair, Mich., and their children to the carnival. One of the best parts for Fiero was reminding her children of fire safety and showing them that police and firefighters are friendly.
Fiero said once when she and her children were playing the card game Apples to Apples Jr., her daughter Nora, 7, associated the word firefighter with scary.
“She said ‘I know they’re good, but they’re scary,’” Fiero said. “Here they get to meet them and try on the masks so they can see what it’s like.”
For East Lansing police Detective Dan DeKorte, the event is a way to get families out and might inspire children of all ages to get involved with safety.
“It might instill in them that this is pretty cool and maybe this is something that they want to do as a career,” he said.
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