Your guide to the official Ho Chi Minh City Police emergency app: what it does, who runs it, how to set it up as a foreigner, and how to file a report in under two minutes.
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Picture a weeknight in your neighbourhood in Saigon. Smoke is coming from a shophouse two doors down, or a motorbike has gone down at the intersection and the rider isn’t getting up. You reach for your phone, and then you hesitate. Which number do you call? Will the operator speak English? How do you explain where you are when the street has three names and your building has none?
Most expats, freelancers and small business owners in Ho Chi Minh City know this feeling. We did too. Then our ward police handed out a flyer encouraging residents to install a free app from Công an TP.HCM (Ho Chi Minh City Police). It’s called SOS An Ninh Trật Tự – CATP HCM, roughly “SOS Security and Public Order”, and if you live or run a business in HCMC, it belongs on your phone.
We installed it, tested it, and wrote up what we learned.
SOS An Ninh Trật Tự is the official emergency reporting system of the Ho Chi Minh City Police. The force built it on its own public security database as part of Vietnam’s national digital transformation push. It is not a private startup and it is not a third-party directory. Reports go straight into the police system.
The app launched on 28 April 2025. It was piloted in two wards, Tân Phú and Phú Mỹ, and in about two months those ward police stations received 54 reports through the app covering public order, traffic safety and fires. In October 2025, HCMC Police rolled the model out across the whole city, including the wards and communes added when Bình Dương and Bà Rịa–Vũng Tàu merged into HCMC. In early 2026, the city’s Department of Culture and Sports set a goal of getting every smartphone user in the city to install it. The official site now reports more than 50,000 users.
Behind the citizen app is a second app used by police officers. When you send a report, it goes to the HCMC Police Command Information Centre, which checks, classifies and forwards it to the relevant police unit. At the same time, the report goes to the police station in the ward where the incident is happening, so officers nearby can respond directly. Officers update the case status as they work, so the command centre can track it.
The police describe the purpose plainly. The app is an emergency alert channel from residents to HCMC Police, so people can report crimes and incidents and the police can respond quickly and effectively. Its stated aim is to fix the weaknesses of traditional reporting: phoning a hotline, or turning up at the ward office and filling in forms.
For foreigners, three things make this especially useful.
It removes the language bottleneck. Calling 113 means describing a stressful situation over the phone, usually in Vietnamese. With the app, you send a photo or video, a pin on the map, and a short description. The evidence does much of the talking.
It solves the “where are you?” problem. The app attaches your exact GPS location, so you don’t have to explain which hẻm (alley) off which street you’re in.
It creates a written record. For a shop, café, office or rental property owner, that matters. A timestamped report with photos is more useful than a phone call nobody can trace later, whether you’re dealing with a break-in, a dangerous electrical fire next door, or something your insurer will ask about.
The city has said publicly that it wants foreign visitors to feel safe. In October 2025, the HCMC Department of Tourism asked the police to keep the emergency reporting app running as part of protecting tourists, especially foreign tourists.
The emergency button is the main feature, but the app also works as a public safety toolkit for the city. In our testing, and in official descriptions, the main tools are:
The version we used offered six interface languages: Vietnamese, English, Japanese, Russian, Korean and Chinese. That reflects the main foreign communities in the city. It also links to related public service apps, including the HCMC digital citizen app and Help 114, the national fire and rescue app. Ward police often promote these together with VNeID when they go door to door.
Setup takes a few minutes:
A note for foreigners: CCCD verification only works with a Vietnamese citizen ID card, so expats generally won’t use that route. We registered with a standard account using email. Foreign residents who have activated a VNeID account (now available to many foreigners living in Vietnam) may be able to use VNeID login, but we haven’t been able to test that yet. Choose your ward carefully during setup. Since the 2025 administrative merger, HCMC uses a new ward and commune structure, and your ward determines which local station receives your reports.
The real test of an emergency app is how fast you can use it under pressure. Here’s the flow:
Your report goes to the Command Information Centre and your ward police at the same time. You can then follow its status in the app.
Tip: Do a practice run of the menus (without sending) on a quiet day. In a real emergency, you don’t want to be finding the buttons for the first time.
This app is still a work in progress. Some features load slowly, a few tools didn’t work fully when we tested them, and parts of the English translation are rough. Early user reviews say the same thing: lots of useful features, but some aren’t fully working yet. Login options for foreigners also aren’t as smooth as they are for Vietnamese citizens.
It also doesn’t replace a phone call when a life is at immediate risk. If someone is seriously injured, or a fire is spreading, call 114 for fire and rescue or 115 for an ambulance first (both are one tap away inside the app), then file the report with photos and location so responders have the full picture.
Even so, for a foreigner in Ho Chi Minh City it’s the most direct digital line to the police and fire services that currently exists. It’s fast, it records your location automatically, it lets you send evidence instead of struggling to explain in another language, and it’s run by the agency that will actually respond. For fires and for any incident that needs the police, it’s one of the quickest ways to raise the alarm.
Install it today, set up your profile, and share it with your team, your landlord and your neighbours. Safety in a city of more than 14 million people works best when everyone can report quickly.
Living or running a business in Vietnam involves a lot of systems like this one. If you need help with the legal, accounting, visa or property side, Easytiger connects you with verified professionals across Ho Chi Minh City and beyond, many of whom speak English.
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