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Rancho Cordova Neighborhood Watch Started With A Facebook Group

RANCHO CORDOVA (CBS13) — It started with just a handful of people, and it's now turned into an army of hundreds in Rancho Cordova who say they are taking their neighborhood back, one click at a time.

The crime fighting effort started on Facebook as a way for Sara Walter to connect with old high-school buddies through social media.

It quickly grew to a neighborhood watch program on steroids.

"It grew to about 450 members," she said. "So members are now sharing with their friends. Their neighbors."

Nine months ago, her Rancho Cordova watch group began sharing concerns, and membership exploded in numbers.

"I noticed we started having crime in our neighborhood," she said. "We had a couple of attempted home invasions that were stopped by residents in the home."

Before you know it, people throughout the city began telling others to be on the lookout.

"We recently had somebody in the group where somebody came up to their door asking for money and got really upset when they wouldn't give them money and she kind of warned us that that was going on," she said.

The Sacramento County Sheriff's Department website says this year alone, Rancho Cordova has seen more than 300 incidents of crime from theft to violent assaults.

To fight back, members sometimes log off social media and hit the streets using an old-school method to recruit.

"Recently I've printed out some business cards with our watch page information on it that some of the members are going to have with them in their purse to kind of hand out to people that they meet in Rancho Cordova at the grocery store or what not," she said.

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