Patrol isn't really hidden. You can make a link to it appear at the top of each page immediately above the link to your Watchlist by going to Profile - Forum Profile Information - and checking the box titled "Show patrol link".
What
is hidden is that you can customize the patrol link to view other recent posts. Patrol shows the last 200 posts by newbie accounts. If you delete ";patrol" from the link, so you are left with
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=recent, you will see the last 100 posts by all accounts. You can also customize this by adding ";boards=x,y,z" on to the end, where x, y, z (and so on) are the boards you are interested in. For example:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=recent;boards=1 will show the last 100 posts in Bitcoin Discussion
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=recent;boards=7,8,57 will show the last 100 posts in Economics, Speculation and Trading Discussion.
You can also chain this together together with patrol, so for example:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=recent;boards=1;patrol will show all the posts by newbies on Bitcoin Discussion out of the last several hundred newbies posts. I'm not sure exactly how many recent newbie posts the forum keeps on file to populate this list from, but it's not a huge number (in the region of several hundred) I think, and since the vast majority of newbie posts are spamming the altcoin boards with bounty reports, then usually this will only show you a small handful of posts.