The Ventura County Sheriff’s Department is pleased to announce a new crime prevention program to the city of Ojai and the unincorporated areas of the Ojai Valley. Starting in October, friends, neighbors and local business can participate in a program that brings the concerned citizens, local businesses and local deputies together, working as a team to create safer neighborhoods in the Ojai Valley. This will encourage better communication and problem solving on a variety of issues in your community.

The City Watch Program simply put is an e-mail based program that allows citizens to communicate with an officer at their local police station. This program will give residents and the business community a personal contact in the Police Department that serves the community. Together we will become a strong team, creating a safer and healthier environment for us all to live and work.

The program will provide information to citizens and businesses about criminal activities in their neighborhoods. This information will be of sufficient detail as to allow the individual to help identify crime patterns in their area and relay information about those crimes directly to police and their neighbors.

Our goal is to have 15,000 people in the Ojai Valley, who are willing to receive information and use that information to help us catch criminals and stop them from committing crimes in our neighborhoods.

How does this all work?

You will be receiving three different types of City Watch Alerts. This information will come directly from Deputies and Detectives who work in your neighborhoods.

City Watch Alert- This is an alert about a crime or a series of crimes occurring in your neighborhood. This type of alert is important and should be read and forwarded to all your neighbors and friends as soon as possible.

City Watch Information- This is information that is very useful but not of an urgent nature. This may include new laws and how they affect you and your family. It may also give information on disaster preparedness.

City Watch Crime Prevention- This is information that you can use to make your home and environment safer and less attractive to criminals. This is also used to send out relevant information on Neighborhood Watch Programs.

After you receive an alert, we ask you to forward the alert to all your friends and neighbors in the Ojai Valley. This will allow everyone to create their own City Watch e-mail list of friends and neighbors. This way there will be hundreds of people, forwarding alerts to thousands of friends and neighbors in our valley.

To give you an example of how well this works, this same program started in the City of Thousand Oaks with 30 local citizens in March of 2007. In November 2007 they had over 22,000 people receiving their alerts. The program was directly responsible for solving many crimes and the prevention of many more. They were also instrumental in the capture of numerous criminals that were working in our neighborhoods.

City Watch can also improve the police services you already enjoy. Lets say you live on a street with people who tend to drive too fast. You send the information to City Watch; I forward this information to our traffic supervisor, who will assign a deputy to work traffic on your street. The supervisor will return your e-mail with his plan and a simple time estimate of when the problem will be addressed.

We will be working on bringing people and resources from the City of Ojai, California Highway Patrol and other Ventura County Agencies into City Watch so that we can address many of the other problems we face in our neighborhoods.

By creating a large team of citizens, Deputies, and Public Officials who care, the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department believes we can make a positive difference in the quality of life here in “The Ojai Valley”.

It is important to remember most criminals are creatures of opportunity. They like easy targets and do not like to be seen while they work. They count on people minding their own business and not calling for help. How nice would it be for criminals in our valley to know there are 15,000 people watching and all of them are looking forward to calling police.

To sign up for your Ojai Valley City Watch just send an e-mail with your name and the area where you live, to Ojaivalley.Citywatch@ventura.org. You will receive a response to your request and that is all there is to it.

If we join together in this effort we will send a message to the criminals that “we are all watching and we look forward to calling the police”.

For further information on this or other community programs call Sgt. Joe Evans at the Ojai Police Department, 805-646-1414.