Local safety works better when neighbours are connected
That is the whole idea, and it is not a new one — it is what a neighbourhood watch has always been. Patrol is an attempt to give it the tools that a WhatsApp group and a Facebook page cannot: everybody in an area reachable without swapping phone numbers, reports with a shape you can act on, and no exact addresses anywhere in the system.
Why it exists
Most Irish estates already have a way of passing news around: a WhatsApp group, a Facebook page, a text tree, a committee with a mailing list. They work, up to a point, and the point they stop working at is always the same one — the households nobody thought to add.
A group chat reaches the people who are already in it. That is fine for arranging a clean-up, and it is the wrong shape for “somebody was trying car doors at 2am”, because the people who most need to hear that are the ones nobody in the group happens to know.
Patrol is built around the area rather than around who knows whom. Your Eircode gives us your town and you tap the map to give us your road; from then on you see what is posted within about 2km, and you can be reached by a neighbour who has never met you and has no way of finding out where you live.
What Patrol holds itself to
Never an exact address
Patrol does not ask for an address and has nowhere to put one. The point you tap is rounded to about 100 metres before it is stored and is never shown to another member — there is no query that turns an account into a doorstep.
No naming, no accusations
Report what happened, not who you think did it. Posts that identify or accuse an individual are removed, and so are the accounts that keep making them. This is the rule Patrol is least flexible about.
Never an emergency service
Nobody is monitoring Patrol, at any hour. Every alert and every form says so, and directs people to 999 or 112. We would rather lose a user to that sentence than have one rely on us.
Not the Gardaí, and not pretending
Patrol has no relationship with An Garda Síochána, Muintir na Tíre or the Text Alert scheme, and does not describe itself in terms that imply one. Borrowing that credibility would be the easiest way to get signups and the fastest way to deserve none.
Real numbers only
Every figure on this site is read from the database when the page loads. If we cannot read it, the section disappears rather than showing a placeholder. There are no illustrative statistics anywhere.
Easy to leave
Delete your account from your own dashboard, and everything you posted goes with it. No email, no retention offer, no survey. The ease of leaving is part of what makes joining reasonable.
Where Patrol actually is
It is a young network, and most areas are empty. We would rather say that on the About page than have you find out on your dashboard.
A neighbourhood safety network has a hard start: the first person in an area gets nothing, so nothing is a reasonable thing to expect if you join alone. Around ten households on an estate is roughly where a report reaches somebody who can act on it, and the product is built to say so rather than to show you an empty feed and let you conclude it is broken.
Which is why the most useful thing anybody can do with Patrol today is not to join — it is to send it to the group they are already in.
Who builds it
Patrol is built and operated by Conjora Limited, a small Irish technology company in County Louth, alongside the other sites in the CheckIreland network. It is not venture funded, it does not carry advertising, and member data is not sold or shared.
If you want to ask something, complain about something, or tell us an Eircode area we haven't mapped, email hello@patrol.ie. A person reads it.