Protocols#

Five short procedures. Between them they cover starting a Red Escudo, getting people onto it, keeping it working, and what to do when the alarm goes off.

They’re deliberately thin. A protocol nobody can remember is decoration.

• Introducing the scheme — the order you talk to people in, and why you don’t start at the puesto.
• Telegram onboarding — the four things each neighbour does, at a table, with their own phone.
• Phone and device onboarding — for people a smartphone can’t reach: the phone they already own, or a pendant the family buys.
• Response — what you do when an alert comes in, and the short list of things you never do.
• Testing and false alarms — drills twice a year, and why a false alarm is a good sign.

Checking on neighbours who live alone is the other half of what a Red Escudo is for, and villages do it their own way — so there’s no protocol here telling them how. What matters to Escudo is the tripwire: nobody answering is itself a reason to raise an alert.

The three that aren’t negotiable#

Everything else here is a village’s to change. These three aren’t, because they are what keeps Escudo legal and worth belonging to:

1. Call 062 or 112 first. Escudo supplements the authorities. It never replaces or bypasses them.
2. Observe, report, help — never intervene, pursue or detain.
3. Behaviour and vehicles, never ethnicity or origin. No photographs of people, ever.