SNOQUALMIE VALLEY – When Lori Riffe saw her husband, Brandon, come back into their house the morning of Feb. 27, she knew something was wrong.

“He was crying,” she said.

The Riffes were one of seven families hit by one or more prowlers the previous night in their Snoqualmie Ridge neighborhood. In addition to having a $300 window knocked out of their car, they lost a laptop computer and a scanner worth a combined $4,000. But it wasn’t the money that upset Brandon Riffe so much. In the same bag with their computer equipment were videotapes documenting the first two years of their son’s life. He had planned to download the tapes to his computer later that day.

“We grew up in neighborhoods where we didn’t lock the door,” Lori Riffe said. “It was devastating.”

There isn’t much hope of getting any of the Riffes’ belongings back. Car prowlers are usually hard to track down. King County Sheriff’s Office Detective Ross Fukuda said most car prowlers, like other thieves, commit their crimes in spurts and then move on since they do not want to be tied to any one area.

Finding the thieves or the stolen items is made even more difficult by the fact that many of the items have no numbers or markings to identify them by, making them easy to sell.

“You don’t want to keep stealing from the same area because sooner or later, you’ll get caught.” Fukuda said. “So the burden of proving a crime is hard.”

Incidents like the Riffes’ are crimes that Snoqualmie police Officer Kim Stonebraker wants to attack.

She was recently put in charge of helping develop a community watch and crime prevention program for the city of Snoqualmie. To her, it’s about time.

Stonebraker said crime prevention is often as simple as being inquisitive about your neighbor or any suspicious activity you see, which many people don’t want to do because they feel it is nosey.

“We shouldn’t be afraid of helping each other out,” Stonebraker said.

Reserve Officer Colleen Johnson, who is helping Stonebraker develop the program, said it will address the needs of a city experiencing the good and bad that comes from growth.

“Everyone has the same problems and the same crimes,” Johnson said. “Whether you are up on the Ridge or down in the old part of town, we can all help each other out.”

As the program is being finalized, Stonebraker will facilitate meetings in the coming months with neighborhood associations and residents to get comments on what crimes need to be addressed.

North Bend already has a similar program. King County Deputy Mike Hasting, who patrols both Fall City and North Bend, works as the Sheriff’s Office’s community police storefront officer for the area. He organizes block watches and gives out crime-prevention tips. If crime does occur, Hasting looks for a pattern and enlists the help of the community.

“If there is a problem in a community that police respond to constantly, then we bring together all the people who are affected by this and work at it,” he said.

The Riffes put up some fliers in the neighborhood, offering a no-questions-asked guarantee if their tapes are returned. They put them up in hopes that someone from the neighborhood may have been involved in the break-in.

Lori Riffe said she isn’t expecting much to come of the fliers. She is, however, planning to get involved in a block-watch program.

“It doesn’t change our attitude about the neighborhood,” she said. “We still feel like this is the right neighborhood for us.”