Hello watchers. Well I would like to start by welcoming the 175 new Watchers who have signed up this last month. As you can see our numbers are growing and we are seeing results.

With all our new members on board, I would like to explain how we work. I will continue to send crime alerts about incidents that occur in the Conejo Valley. I am selective about which alerts I send. I evaluate each incident and decide if it is appropriate for our group.

Recently a fellow Watcher suggested that I separate the Alerts from the Information e-mails. This is a great idea and so from now on the alerts will be separate. This way you can read the information e-mails at your conveince.

Now how do we reach the most people in our community? Well I believe we do that by each one of you forwarding the alerts to everyone you know in the Conejo Valley. I suggest each of you create your own City Watch Group in your e-mail program. This way you can easily forward all the alerts you receive.

We currently have about 475 Watchers. You can see that if each one of us forward to 20 of our friends or neighbors, we really reach about 9,000 people. Now some of you have the ability to forward to many more and I encourage that. I know we have several Watcher who forward to more than three hundred people. With this type of cooperation we will make a difference for sure.

With the increased numbers we will start to make it impossible for crooks to operate in our community with out getting our attention. You know the old saying "two heads are better than one". Well I say 50,000 people watching for crooks makes our community safer.

To give you an example: This weekend one of our Watchers heard a car pull up in front of her home late at night. The watcher had seen the alerts about the vehicle burglaries and was ready. The Watcher was able to copy down the license plate number and call police. Before police arrived the watcher observed the man take a bicycle and put it into his vehicle just before he drove away. Now we do not know where the bicycle came from but that does not matter to us. If this guy was out committing crimes, we now have a way to identify him. Just because we may not have a crime reported yet does not mean we won't need to know about other crimes this guy was doing. To be fair, if he was not committing crimes he should have no problem tell that to our Detectives.

I talked to Detectives this morning and they are investigating the possible theft. The information our Watcher provided was critical to the investigation. Detectives can now compare this crook to other thefts that have been occurring in our community.

This is just one example of how important it is for us to provide the community with information about crimes in their area. The community can now work with police to "catch those crooks" and let everyone else know that " we are watching and we can not wait to call the Police."