Who are we?

We’re simply Egyptians, who don’t belong to any political party and don’t have any political activity. We did like you did and stood against corruption, protected our homes from thugs and street gangsters. We love our country Egypt and we strive to eliminate bribery and spread safety. Therefore, we thought about creating this portal that works on catching criminals. Thus we called it Zabatak, the Arabic word for “Caught You!”

Our aim is to return safety and security to the streets of Egypt and treat the negatives of the Egyptian community so that our country would move forward.

How?

Our idea is that we would all start cooperating together like we did during the revolution and people’s committees to present solutions to people from people because they are the ones who see, report, suggest and participate.

See: We all see a lot of wrong things in the street but not many care or try to do something to solve these problems. Now, anyone who would see something wrong must report it immediately.

Report: There’s no doubt that you want to tell officials about the wrong things you see but maybe you don’t have time or are afraid to get hurt if you report someone. Our job is to facilitate to you all possible media that would allow you to report anything you see in the least time and effort, with complete protection to your personal identification information.

Suggest: Many other have complained before about what you’re complaining about now. We won’t wait for someone to solve our problems. Think with us how we might solve these problems and vote on the suggested solutions. Say your opinion and let people hear you.

Participate: We will all pick a solution and our team at Zabatak will make sure that the chosen solution is put into action at the soonest time possible and we will all watch and follow and participate in implementing this solution that we chose.

What will I benefit?

Imagine if you left your office to find your car window broken and something really valuable is stolen from the car. You have to go file a report at the police station but you might also ask other people what they saw. What if you found out that someone saw the criminal and knows how he looks like, and that it’s even possible that he might have taken pictures of the criminal? For sure you want to meet this person and for sure he wants to give you this information. It is our job to make this information available to you so that through the police or through the help of people around you, you would return the stolen things, plus that you would catch the criminal.

So what do you do with these reports?

1-      We make the information available for anyone who would make use of it and do something of benefit. We believe that more than one person witness everything wrong that happens, and every person has a part of the information. If a lady’s bag is robbed in a street, someone might have seen the thief’s face, and someone else might have saved the motorbike’s license plate numbers and someone else might have video recorded the whole incident on their phone. All those people have parts of the information and if they all put what they know together they’ll complete the picture and the lady whose bag was robbed will have enough information to help the police catch the thief.

2-      We make statistics about places where certain crimes are more common at certain times. Also through the reports that we get we are able to locate centers of crime and corruption in Egypt. This information is beneficial in 4 ways:

1. It is of benefit to you, so that you would know what is happening around you and be careful. For example if you’re driving at a new area and you know that the previous week there was more than one car stolen, you will be more careful to park your car close to you and in a secure place. And if you know that the apartment you will buy is very close to a drug dealing area, you’ll change your mind.
2. It is of benefit to the government and Interior Ministry because people are able to report everything they see and we can evaluate through our number the performance of different authorities and their ability to solve the announced problems. So if many people reported that a certain street is full of thugs who rob people every day and we deliver this information to the Interior Ministry, then a week later the people are still complaining then no one has done anything. At that time the person in authority will be scandalized and obliged to quit his job for someone else to do it correctly.
3. We do an accurate analysis for every group of reports and bring out a result that is explained in an article where we advice people and direct their attention to specific points to increase security of people’s belongings. This is similar to the series of articles “How to protect yourself” from mobile robbery, car robbery, apartment robbery, etc.
4. There must be a few people among the 80 million who have realistic ideas of solutions to these problems. Propose your solution, and others will propose their solutions too. People will then evaluate all solutions and we will adopt the best one to put it into action under your supervision.

How do you make sure these reports are real?

There’s a possibility that someone would make a false report or deliberately spread rumors to scare people. Although we are not any investigation authority but we try as much as possible to evaluate all the reports we get.

1-      We don’t accept any reports accusing a particular person by name or address.

2-      We rate every report we get out of 5. 1 is the least credible and 5 is the most. The rating is done according to the amount of information provided in the report. If a photo, video or document have been submitted with the report, the credibility rating increases.

3-      Recurrent reports about the same problem in the same area increases the credibility of a report.

4-      Through the Zabatak working team network that’s spread all over Egypt and the people’s committees, we are able to ask and make sure the report is real.

5-      People can vote for the credibility of reports.

What can I do?

If you see a worker taking bribery, someone driving in the wrong direction, see people selling illegal stuff by your house … from now on we won’t see anything wrong and let it pass. From now on we’ll all cooperate like we did before.

Take a photo and report anything wrong you see, because from now on you’ll report will differ.