"We probably have on average maybe nine people going to a crime-watch meeting," says Assistant Chief Vincent Golbeck of the Dallas Police Department. "And those nine people may be representing a neighborhood of 300 households. So we have to rely on the crime-watch chairpersons and those that were in the meeting to use an e-mail distribution list, or a phone tree." "So Nextdoor is a tool we utilize along with Nixle, Facebook, tweets, to try to get our message proactively to as many households as we can. We'd rather hit 200 to 300 houses versus nine." Fenwick has seen similar benefits in Ventura. "At our height of what I call Neighborhood Watch 1.0, which was all manual and meetings at the station or at someone's house, we had 200 to 300" participants, the chief says. "In the five to six months we've been on Nextdoor, we're up to 1,500 members already." Along the other axis, residents are communicating peer-to-peer and coordinating their actions, often without involving the police.