Quartier Watch
A hyperlocal neighborhood safety companion for Quebec cities that aggregates police reports, alerts residents to nearby incidents, and surfaces trends block by block.
residents of mid-size Quebec cities like Sherbrooke, Saguenay and Trois-Rivières who want neighborhood-level safety context beyond press releases
- Police-report alerts geofenced to your address based on public SPS and SQ bulletins
- Neighborhood-level incident trends over rolling 30, 90 and 365-day windows
- Anonymous tip line that forwards to the local police service with optional identity protection
- Bilingual French and English municipal directory with non-emergency contacts and resource listings
tragedies like the Sherbrooke intrafamilial case often break on municipal sites hours before residents hear through word of mouth, and there is no single bilingual feed that translates SPS and SQ bulletins into neighborhood-level context.
Google Trends anchor on a generic term 'sherbrooke' is weak proxy; CrimeMaps.ca already visualizes 583 SPS incidents in Sherbrooke (Nov–Dec 2024) and Numbeo shows meaningful baseline crime indices (Sherbrooke 24.88, Trois-Rivières 29.34), so latent interest in neighborhood-level crime data exists, but no evidence of unfulfilled search demand for a dedicated Quebec hyperlocal app.Sherbrooke Crime Map & Statistics: 583 Incidents (2024-2024) — CrimeMaps.ca ↗Crime Comparison Between Sherbrooke and Trois-Rivieres, QC ↗
The space is crowded: CrimeMaps.ca aggregates 62 Canadian cities (including Sherbrooke) with neighbourhood-level filtering, StreetScan already operates in Quebec with email/address alerts, and OpenCrimeMap and SpotCrime cover similar territory — only the bilingual SPS/SQ-translation angle appears marginally differentiated.CrimeMaps.ca — Interactive Crime Map of Canada ↗StreetScan ↗OpenCrimeMap - Interactive Crime Visualization & Safety Insights ↗
Proven category WTP exists — StreetScan offers a paid subscription tier with multi-address monitoring and Citizen Premium monetizes live incident feeds — but Quebec mid-size cities (Sherbrooke/Saguenay/Trois-Rivières each ~140–160K) are smaller, more francophone, and price-sensitive markets where premium conversion for a niche safety app is unproven.Sign Up - StreetScan ↗Get the full picture - Citizen ↗
Safety/neighbourhood awareness is evergreen demand resilient to economic cycles, and Quebec's alert infrastructure (alerte.gouv.qc.ca) plus municipal open-data programs signal durable data supply, though privacy regulation around publishing crime at the block level is a recurring legal risk.Carte | Québec En Alerte ↗Accueil - Sûreté du Québec ↗
Open police data is already publicly available and geocodable (CrimeMaps.ca demonstrates SPS publishes occurrence-level records, Saguenay police site exists), and modern LLMs trivially handle FR↔EN translation and bulletin summarization — building an MVP is straightforward, though neighbourhood-resolution geocoding for SQ bulletins is the main engineering hurdle.Saguenay.ca - Police | Accueil ↗Sherbrooke Crime Map & Statistics: 583 Incidents (2024-2024) — CrimeMaps.ca ↗