Spotter › Melbourne

Safety alerts for Melbourne

Live incidents from Victoria’s official emergency feed, a warning before you drive into a repeat-incident area, and your family’s position against whatever is happening — in one free app.

What you actually get in Melbourne

Spotter reads Victoria’s official incident data — the same source behind the state’s warnings — and shows the incidents near you, sorted by how close they are rather than by when they were filed. Structure fires, hazardous material incidents, rescues, flooding and grass fires across Greater Melbourne appear on the home feed as they are published.

Two things are deliberately different from a plain feed reader:

• It ranks by distance to your people, not just to you. If someone in your circle is within 1 km of a live incident, that becomes the top card — “Mum is 450 m from this: Fire” — with a one-tap “Are you OK?” message. Beyond 1 km nothing is raised, because a fire three suburbs away is not news.
• It never tells you an area is safe. When there is nothing live nearby the app says “Nothing reported near you”. That is a different claim from “you are safe”, and we are not willing to make the second one.

Risk Radar: a warning before you arrive

Most safety apps tell you what already happened. Risk Radar watches the 20 nearest repeat-incident areas around you using the phone’s own region monitoring, so it works with the app closed and costs almost no battery. An area becomes a hotspot when there have been three or more reports inside roughly a one-kilometre cell in the last 180 days, and the warning circle is 1.2 km across.

In practice that means you get a notification as you drive into an area with a genuine recent pattern — a station car park with repeated break-ins, a stretch of road with repeated collisions — rather than a generic “this suburb scores 6 out of 10” rating. There is no suburb score in Spotter, because a single number across a whole postcode tells you nothing useful about the street you are standing on.

Family safety across a city this size

Melbourne is roughly 10,000 km², and a lot of households are spread across it — school in one suburb, work in another, grandparents half an hour away. Spotter’s Family Map handles the ordinary version of that:

• Saved places for Home, School and Work, with an arrival notice when someone gets there — the “text me when you land” message nobody remembers to send.
• Mutual approval on every connection. Nobody can add you without your consent, and you can switch to an approximate suburb-level position or pause sharing entirely at any time.
• Removing a connection takes effect immediately and is not announced to the person removed, so leaving a circle quietly does not tip anyone off.

Your part of Melbourne

Melbourne covers close to 10,000 km² and the picture is genuinely different across it — industrial land in the south east and west, the bushfire interface in the outer north and the Dandenong Ranges, coastal flooding along the bay, high-rise structure fires in the inner city. These pages cover what recurs where:

• South East Melbourne — Dandenong, Noble Park, Springvale, Clayton, Oakleigh and more
• Melbourne's Western Suburbs — Footscray, Sunshine, Altona, Williamstown, Yarraville and more
• Melbourne's Northern Suburbs — Preston, Reservoir, Coburg, Brunswick, Thomastown and more
• Melbourne's Eastern Suburbs — Box Hill, Doncaster, Blackburn, Nunawading, Glen Waverley and more
• Inner Melbourne and the CBD — Melbourne CBD, Southbank, Docklands, Carlton, Fitzroy and more
• Bayside and South East Beachside Melbourne — Brighton, Hampton, Sandringham, Black Rock, Beaumaris and more

Stolen cars and missing persons

Spotter also checks the police stolen property register, so you can look up a plate before buying a used car, and it can match a photo against public missing-persons and wanted lists. That matching runs entirely on your device — the photo is never uploaded — and only against closed, named lists. It is not a search-anyone tool, and it is not pointed at social media.