Keep your village safe
Report what you see in seconds. VillageWatch strips out personal details, plots it on a live map, and alerts your neighbours the moment a pattern emerges.
Free for residents · Your exact location is never shared · Reports are anonymised before anyone sees them
- Low
- Worth logging, no immediate risk
- Medium
- Neighbours should keep an eye out
- High
- Act now — secure property, stay alert
- Critical
- Danger to life or property, call 999 first
Built for parish councils and neighbourhood watch schemes in England · Open source · UK data, hosted in London · Free for one village
Three steps, and the street knows
The gap between spotting something and everyone knowing about it is usually days. VillageWatch closes it to minutes, without anyone having to chase a coordinator for an update.
- Step 1
Report
Under a minute, from the pavement
Pick what happened, drop a pin, add a photo if you have one. Say it in your own words — no forms to decode, no jargon to learn.
- Step 2
AI processes
Personal details never make it public
Names, number plates and faces are stripped out. The report is categorised, given a severity, and placed on the map with your location blurred.
- Step 3
Community alerted
The right people, straight away
Neighbours nearby get a push notification. Your coordinator sees the full context in their queue and can escalate to the police.
Built for a village, not a police force
Everything here exists because a coordinator was doing it by hand: retyping reports, blurring photos, and noticing on the fourth break-in that there had been three others.
Live incident map
Every published report, colour-coded by severity, filterable by type and date. See at a glance whether the trouble is on your street or three villages over.
AI anonymisation
The original text is kept under lock and key for coordinators. What neighbours read is a rewritten version with identifying details removed, and photos with every face blacked out.
Pattern detection
Six vehicle break-ins within 400 metres over four nights is a pattern, not a coincidence. VillageWatch spots the cluster and names it before anyone has to join the dots by hand.
Push alerts that respect you
Choose the minimum severity worth waking you. Critical incidents reach everyone; a missing cat reaches the people who asked to hear about missing cats.
WhatsApp Channel
Approve a report and it is formatted ready for your village’s WhatsApp Channel — copy, paste, done — so neighbours who never install anything still see the serious ones. It is a one-way feed: a headline, an area, a short extract and a link, with no phone numbers shared in either direction.
A moderation queue, not an inbox
Every report arrives with the original wording, the anonymised version, the photos, and the map pin side by side. Publish, resolve or reject in one click — and every action is logged, so the trail holds up if the police ever ask for it.
- Full audit trail on every publish, edit and rejection
- Original report text stays restricted to your team
- Pattern alerts flag clusters before you notice them
- Verify residents so only real neighbours can post
Awaiting review
3Van circling Mill Lane after dark
VW-2026-0184 · 12 minutes ago
Shed forced open on Church Row
VW-2026-0183 · 1 hour ago
Fly-tipping at the recreation ground
VW-2026-0182 · Yesterday
Illustrative preview. Sign in to see your village's queue.
Free for your village. Properly free.
One parish, every resident, every feature — no card, no trial window, no resident cap. VillageWatch is open source, so a council that would rather run it themselves can.
Village
Available nowFreefor one village, always
Everything a parish needs to run a watch scheme. No card, no trial, no resident limit.
- One village, unlimited residents
- AI anonymisation on every report
- Live map, incident list and push alerts
- Coordinator dashboard and moderation queue
- Weekly digest and pattern detection
- Full audit trail and CSV export
Pro
Planned£15per month, per village
For clusters of parishes and anyone answering to a council. Planned — not yet available.
- Everything in Village
- Multiple villages under one coordinator team
- Cross-village pattern detection
- Email and SMS alongside push
- Longer retention and scheduled exports
- Priority support
Pro is a preview of what is planned, not something you can buy today — nothing on this site takes payment. If it would suit your group of parishes, create a free village and say so; that is how the order gets decided.
The four everyone asks
If yours is not here, the privacy notice goes into considerably more detail.
Is my data safe?
Reports are held in a UK-region database and the app is served from London. Your exact location is never stored — coordinates are moved by about a hundred metres before they are written down, so the pin lands on the right street and not on your door. Faces in a photograph are covered on your own phone before it is uploaded — a black box, or a mosaic and a blur, depending on what your village has chosen, and you can always ask for the black box — which also strips the GPS tag cameras write into every picture. Reports are archived after 12 months and photographs are deleted after 6.
Who can see what I report?
Your neighbours see a rewritten version with names, registrations and house numbers taken out. Your village coordinator can see your original wording, and every time they do it is written to an audit trail with their name against it. Nobody outside your village sees any of it — not another village, not us. The one exception is a WhatsApp Channel, which is public and which your coordinator has to switch on: nothing is posted automatically, but a coordinator can copy a serious report to it as a headline, an area, a short extract and a link, and nothing else.
How does the AI work?
When you submit a report, the text goes to Claude, which rewrites it without the identifying details, sorts it into a category and suggests how serious it is. You see the result and can edit it before anything is saved. If the AI is unavailable your report still files in your own words, and the screen says so. Reports wait for a coordinator to approve them unless your village has turned that review off, which is a setting its coordinators control and which the app tells you about before you file.
How do I become a coordinator?
Register as a resident, then apply from Settings. You are asked how you are involved in the village — Neighbourhood Watch, the parish council, something else — and why you want the access. A platform administrator reviews the application by hand and you hear back either way. It is not self-service on purpose: a coordinator can read the original wording of every report their village files, so somebody has to decide that rather than a form.
Is it free?
Free for one village, for residents and coordinators alike, with no card and no trial period. A paid tier for groups of parishes is planned and does not exist yet — nothing on this site can charge anybody anything today.
Your village is already watching. Give it somewhere to look.
Set up takes a few minutes. Bring your coordinator, bring your street, bring the group chat that never quite worked.