Reporting an incident
Photo, description, GPS. What you submit, what gets shared with neighbors, and what stays anonymous.
Spotting something off in your neighborhood — a suspicious car parked too long, a broken window, a person who doesn't seem to belong — is a real signal the heatmap and the patrol both want to know about. Filing a report takes about 30 seconds.
How to file
- From the map screen, tap Report Incident (the warning-triangle icon).
- Pick a category (theft, suspicious activity, vandalism, noise, other).
- Type a one-line description. The shorter the better; "white pickup parked outside 12 Maple, no plate" is more useful than two paragraphs.
- Optionally attach a photo. The phone strips EXIF location from the photo before upload (your home address won't leak through metadata).
- Tap Submit.
Incident Report
Incident report form with category, description, and attach-photo button
What gets shared
- The category, description, and photo appear in your neighborhood forum, visible to other residents and the on-duty patrol.
- Your GPS coordinates (the location the report was filed from) feed into the heatmap as raw input. The exact coordinates are visible to the patrol but not to other residents — they only see "near 12 Maple" type descriptions.
- Your name appears on the report by default. You can choose to file anonymously; the patrol still sees you in their dispatch console (so they can follow up if needed) but other residents see "Anonymous resident".
What does not get shared
- Your home address.
- Your phone number.
- Your other reports (each one is independent).
- Any face captured in your photo if you turn on the optional auto-blur.
How quickly the patrol sees it
Reports show up in the patrol's incident feed instantly. Most active patrols glance at the feed every few minutes; high-priority categories (suspicious activity, theft in progress) trigger a push notification to the patrol so they don't have to be staring at their phone to notice.
Editing or deleting a report
If you got something wrong — wrong street, misidentified what was happening — open the report from your activity tab and tap Edit or Delete. Edits are tracked (visible to the patrol with a "edited at" timestamp) so the historical record is honest.