From an Eircode to a useful local alert
Patrol has no cameras, no sensors, and nobody monitoring anything. It is a way for people who live near each other to pass on something worth knowing, with enough structure that it stays useful. Here is exactly how that works.
Your Eircode places you in an area
An Eircode has seven characters. The first three are the routing key — it covers a whole town, or one of the Dublin postal districts, and it is public information. The last four identify a single letterbox.
Patrol reads the routing key, and places you at the geographic centre of that area. That centre is the same point for every member in the area, and it is typically several hundred metres from anybody's actual home. It is the location the product uses for everything.
This is the privacy design, not a shortcut. Patrol cannot show anyone where you live because it never learned. There is no feature, and no database query, that turns a Patrol account into a street address.
Try it — no account needed
This is the same lookup the product runs, and it tells you the real state of your area.
You confirm an email before you can post
Joining takes a name, an email and a password. You can read your area straight away, but you cannot post until you click the link in the confirmation email.
That step is doing real work. It is what stops somebody making an account, posting an accusation about a household in an estate they have never been to, and vanishing. It is not a strong identity check — nothing here proves you live where you say — but combined with per-account rate limits it removes the cheapest kind of abuse.
Alerts reach 5km of area centres
When a member posts, everyone whose area centre is within 5km sees it. Same radius for everybody; there is no smaller one on a cheaper plan, because there is no cheaper plan.
The distance is centre to centre, not house to house — the product does not know where either house is. In practice that means an alert covers your town and the nearest few, which is about the right size for “worth knowing”.
An empty area is not a broken product. It is an unfinished one.
Here is the part most products would not print. If you join and you are the only person in your town, Patrol will tell you nothing — not because something is wrong, but because there is nobody to tell you anything.
Around 10 households on an estate is where a report starts reaching somebody who can act on it. Below that, posting is shouting into a field. The product says so on your dashboard, with the real number for your area, rather than showing you an empty feed and letting you conclude it is dead.
Which makes the ask straightforward: send it to a group you are already in. That is not a growth tactic bolted on the side — it is the feature working. Every area on Patrol that is worth being in got there that way.
What Patrol does not do
- It does not contact the Gardaí. Posting here reports nothing to anybody official.
- It is not monitored. Nobody reads Patrol on your behalf, at any hour.
- It does not verify reports. Every alert is one neighbour’s account, and is labelled as one.
- It does not track your location. There is no background location, ever — only the area you told us.
- It does not let you name, accuse, photograph or identify a person. That is a rule, not an oversight.
In an emergency, ring 999 or 112. Patrol is for telling neighbours things afterwards, not for getting help now.
More detail on safety & privacy, or the full FAQ.