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 gives us your town
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. That is enough to tell you whether anyone near you is on Patrol before you hand over anything — which is what the box below does — but it is not enough to build a neighbourhood from, and we used to pretend otherwise.
A routing key is a town, not a neighbourhood. A Dublin postal district runs to tens of thousands of households. A safety feed covering all of it is a local newspaper: almost nothing in it happened anywhere you walk, and the one report that mattered is buried. So the Eircode is where placement starts, not where it ends — step two is you telling us your road.
Try it — no account needed
This is the same lookup the product runs, and it tells you the real state of your area.
You tap roughly where you live
A map opens on your town and you tap your road. Not your house — anywhere on your street or estate is close enough, because Patrol rounds whatever you tap to about 100 metres before storing it. What ends up in the database is a stretch of road.
It has to be you who tells us. Eircode cannot: the four characters after the routing key are deliberately randomised so that location cannot be inferred from them, and neighbouring houses do not get neighbouring codes. The alternative is licensing the national address database, which would hand us your actual front door whether you wanted us to have it or not. Asking you is both cheaper and less invasive.
You can skip it. Nothing is blocked. Your feed just covers your whole town until you set a point, and the dashboard says so plainly rather than showing you an empty page.
Alerts reach about 2km around you
When a member posts, everyone within about 2km of them sees it — roughly a twenty-minute walk, which is about the distance at which “someone was trying car doors” is still about your own street.
You can widen it to 5km in settings, and rural members usually should: 2km around a Dublin estate covers thousands of households, and 2km around a townland can cover thirty. But wider is not better — it buys reach with relevance, and a feed full of things that happened somewhere you never go is one you stop opening.
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 single point you tapped, rounded to about 100 metres.
- 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.