National Night Out will take place from 6 to 8 p.m. Tuesday at the Sonora Opera Hall, 250 S. Washington St., Sonora. In Angels Camp, Greenhorn Creek residents will meet at 7 p.m. at the club house for ice cream and discussion. For more information, call Lt. Mark Stinson of the Sonora Police Department at 532-8141 or Kathy Maxwell with the Angels Camp Police Department at 736-2567.

By KATY BRANDENBURG

The Union Democrat

How well do you know your neighborhood police officers? For those who want to get to know them — and their fellow community members — better, Aug. 5 is National Night Out.

Sonora residents and those who live in Greenhorn Creek in Angels Camp are invited to participate in the event, which thousands of communities nationwide participate in. This is the first year Angels Camp has participated, because, for the first time, enough residents have joined together to start a Neighborhood Watch group, said Kathy Maxwell, crime prevention officer with the Angels Camp Police Department.

"Neighborhood Watches are preventative medicine," she said. "It's the best way to keep crime from coming to your neighborhood — which it eventually will if not everyone is involved in stopping it."

Police say National Night Out is designed to heighten crime and drug-prevention awareness; generate support for, and participation in, local anti-crime efforts; strengthen neighborhood spirit and police/community partnerships; and send a message to criminals letting them know neighborhoods are organized and fighting back.

"We'd like to get other neighborhoods in on it," Maxwell said of the Neighborhood Watch program. "If we could get all of Angels Camp on Watch, that would be so awesome. Crime would be almost down to nothing."

Retired from the Calaveras County Sheriff's Office, Maxwell said she has been involved with neighborhood watches for 15 years, and seen the number of burglaries and calls for service in residential areas decrease drastically after Neighborhood Watches began.

"When you've got neighbors looking out for each other, it prevents people from feeling free to go in and steal," she said. "It also works really well with neighbors getting to know law enforcement officers and vice versa."

Sonora's "block party" will take place at the Opera Hall, where Officer Jamie Boeding will talk about traffic safety — specifically, cell phone laws and certain areas of Sonora with high accident rates — and Investigator Hal Prock will speak on identity theft and elder abuse.

After that, officers will field questions from the audience. Police will also discuss and share the results of selected DUI and speed enforcements over the past three years funded by a traffic safety grant, Lt. Mark Stinson said.

Contact Katy Brandenburg at kbrandenburg @uniondemocrat.com or 588-4528.