Ring Launches Request for Assistance Posts on the Neighbors App

Ring’s mission is to make neighborhoods safer for everyone. Accomplishing this requires participation from all members of the community, including public safety agencies like police and fire departments. The Ring Neighbors app supports this participation by facilitating open communication between residents, and the public safety agencies that serve them.

We believe transparency and accountability are crucial to safer, better communities. Since our founding, we have been committed to improving our products and services by listening to and incorporating feedback from all parts of our communities. As part of this effort, we have spent the past year working with independent third-party experts to identify ways to provide customers with greater insight into how public safety agencies use the Neighbors app, including how they inform and request help from those around them.

Introducing Request for Assistance Posts

Beginning next week, public safety agencies will only be able to request information or video from their communities through a new, publicly viewable post category on Neighbors called Request for Assistance. Public safety agencies can use these posts to notify residents of an incident and ask their communities for help related to an investigation. All Request for Assistance posts will be publicly viewable in the Neighbors feed, and logged on the agency’s public profile. This way, anyone interested in knowing more about how their police agency is using Request for Assistance posts can simply visit the agency’s profile and see the post history.

Request for Assistance posts can only be issued from verified public safety agency profiles. We have guidelines in place to prevent overly broad requests, and all public safety agencies must abide by our Request for Assistance Policy and Guidelines, which are publicly available in our Help Center.

Whether you’re a Neighbors user, Ring device owner, or both—you always have total control over your experience. Request for Assistance posts are opt-in, nothing is shared with any agency unless you actively go through the steps of choosing to do so.  You can also remove Request for Assistance posts from your feed. If you previously opted out of Video Requests, you will not be notified when public safety agencies post a Request for Assistance.

If you do choose to respond to a Request for Assistance post, you can click on the link in the post to share videos securely with the agency. Each post also includes the agency’s contact information in case you want to reach out to them directly.

For more information about how public safety agencies use Neighbors, please visit our Help Center Article on this topic. 

Update, January 24, 2024: The Request for Assistance feature referenced in this blog has been discontinued. To learn more about the latest features on the Neighbors App, please see our blog post Ring Announces New Neighbors App Features, Sunsets Request for Assistance Post

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