Bring your whole estate on in one message
Patrol is only useful when the people around you are on it. A committee with a mailing list and forty households can do in one evening what individual signups never do — which is why an area that arrives together works from its first day.
Check your area
See how many households near you are already on Patrol before you bring it to a meeting.
One estate beats a hundred scattered signups
An alert reaches the people signed up nearby. That is the whole mechanism, and it means the unit that matters is the estate, not the country.
About 10 households
That is roughly where a report reaches somebody who can actually act on it. For an individual joining alone it is a long climb. For a committee it is one message to a list you already have.
You already have the reach
The hard part of activating an area is knowing the households and being trusted by them. A residents’ association has both. Patrol has neither, which is why we are asking you rather than buying ads.
Joins credited to your group
We will set you up with a shared invite link, so you can see how many of your households have actually come across — rather than guessing at the next meeting.
What is built, and what is not
You are recommending this to your neighbours, so you should be able to answer the awkward question at the meeting. Here is the honest inventory.
- Members placed by Eircode routing key — no anonymous accounts, no manual approval for you to run
- Alerts to everyone signed up within 5km of the area centre
- Email confirmation required before anyone can post
- A structured report form that refuses names, addresses and accusations
- A one-tap content report on every alert, read by a person
- Rate limits on posting, signup and invitations
- Self-service account deletion for every member
- A shared invite link that credits joins to your group
- Coordinator moderation tools — no approval queue, no pinning, no admin panel for your committee
- Blocking or muting another member inside the product
- Photo attachments on alerts
- Events, lost-and-found and local recommendations, which the app lists as coming
- Any kind of alert analytics or area report
- An iOS app — iPhone users add the web app to their home screen
Content reports come to Patrol and we act on them. If your committee needs to moderate its own area, that is not possible yet — tell us and it will inform what gets built.
Four steps, over about a week
Check your area and read the privacy page
Before anything else. Somebody at the meeting will ask what Patrol knows about where they live, and the answer — the routing key, never the house — is one you should have in your own words. It is all on the safety & privacy page.
Email us and get your group link
Tell us your area and roughly how many households. You get a link that credits joins to your group, and a short plain-English explainer you can attach to a circular without rewriting it.
Send it once, to everyone
One message to the list, the WhatsApp group, or the newsletter. Not a campaign — a single ask, from a name people recognise, which is worth more than any advertising we could buy.
Post the first useful thing
An area that joins and then sits silent goes quiet for good. The first post does not need to be an incident — a note about the estate meeting, or the bin collection change, is what teaches people the app is worth opening.
What we will not do
Worth stating, because a community group is entitled to know what it is attaching its name to.
- We will not claim any Garda or council endorsement for your scheme, or ours. Patrol has none.
- We will not send anything to your households other than what they sign up for.
- We will not publish your area’s activity, membership or coverage anywhere public.
- We will not sell or share member data, and there is no advertising in the product.
- We will not host content that names or accuses an individual, on any area’s feed, whoever posts it.
Patrol is not affiliated with An Garda Síochána, Muintir na Tíre, the Text Alert scheme or any official Neighbourhood Watch programme. If your group already runs one of those, Patrol sits alongside it — it does not replace it, and we will not describe it as though it does.