By MELISSA PEACOCK

A little girl goes along with a stranger to help him look for his puppy. Later, she is found dead.

Another little girl spends harrowing hours with no food and little water. She chews through tape binding her wrists in a daring escape.

Samantha Runnion, Erica Pratt, Elizabeth Smart, Alexis Patterson. We have seen their little smiling faces in photos on the news, read their names in big black headlines. But no matter how much media coverage national kidnappings get, we still somehow feel that our community is immune.

On Tuesday night at Night Out Against Crime, we as a community had the perfect opportunity to get out in our neighborhoods and safeguard our community from these and other crimes. We had the opportunity to tell criminals that we will not let our children be stalked. Yet, party after party, block after block revealed more of the same. Large subdivisions with only a few block parties. Parties with only a handful of residents concerned enough to attend.

Many of these neighborhoods are teeming with children, easy targets for child-predators.

According to the US Census Bureau, St. John the Baptist Parish had more than 30 percent of its population under the age of 18 in 2000. The question is: What are we doing to protect them?

When a child goes missing from a home or a neighborhood, one of the first things parents, police and reporters do is talk to neighbors, bystanders, anyone who might have witnessed something suspicious. If a house or neighborhood is burglarized, police look to neighbors on the same block to provide them with information.

Most importantly, neighbors are the eyes and ears of the community. Ultimately, these individuals have the power to prevent abductions and other crimes before they happen, reporting any suspicious activity in the neighborhood to other neighbors and the police.

These are the people we entrust with our families, our property and our lives. Do we know them?

Police can not prevent crime alone. Yet, ironically, more police officers showed up at block parties Tuesday than residents. The Sheriff’s Department did a great job representing law enforcement’s role in preventing crime, but where was the other half of the police-community partnership?

While Night Out Against Crime events are designed to be informal and fun, they serve an important function within the neighborhoods, giving neighbors the opportunity to meet each other and local police, pass along contact information and develop community assistance plans to protect homes, property and, yes, even local children.

Next year, make it a point to mark Night Out Against Crime on your calendar. Take an hour or two to get to know the people in your neighborhood.

But it does take more than just one night. Start now. Get together with neighbors to exchange names and numbers. Get to know faces of adults and children living in the neighborhood. Introduce yourself to new residents in the community. Know who belongs.

This is the South. We should be known for our hospitality, not our crime! It should not take tragedy to bring a community together.

MELISSA PEACOCK is a reporter for L’Observateur. She may be reached at (985) 652-9545.