Since change from the top seems unlikely. Civil society should establish programs to reach out and provide alternative career options for current police officers who are willing to leave their jobs.

For example, they may help them transform into lawyers. NGOs may fund masters programs in different Law schools, provide them with extra tuition help, enroll them in human rights courses and help them establish small combined legal offices through grants.

Priority can be set to younger officers, ones with a publicly clean record. NGOs may also provide legal aid (or insurance) for old cases of police brutality or torture that might be raised against them after they leave the force.

Such NGO, and that's quite challenging, can transform into a self-sustainable association chaired by former officers.

The idea is to encourage officers who are not happy with the current status quo and are contemplating leaving but have limited or no options.

Using a copy of all the obituaries published online by the Ahram newspaper from January 2002 till April 2008 it is possible to use Linux command line tools (gawk, sed, bash) to find family relations between individuals in certain professions. An example given here explores the family links between a sample of 456 Egyptian state security officers.

This is a very brief description of the method.

1. The first step is to convert the HTML files downloaded by curl into one giant text file.
2. Then to move each separate obituary into a line of it's own.
3. Extract officer names sandwiched between rank and place of work into a separate text file.
4. Search for the names of each officer through each obituary, family links between different officers can be discovered.
5. The output is in GraphViz .dot format, which draws a graph similar to the one below.



Graph showing 63 family links between 174 officers from 456 Egyptian state security officers. Each link corresponds to a family tie of a variable degree of relationship including in-laws.

This is just a preview of what might be possible using a data set of 43,156 obituary. Without control group(s), this graph says nothing other than it's pretty and that there are family links between officers. Other methods for analysis of data could be done using statistical methods to answer different questions.

UPDATE: I attached the list of SS officers and the script used to find links between officers and output a .dot Graphviz file. You can download the obituaries dataset from here.

Not all humans are capable of producing flammable flatus. Flatus is flammable because it contains Methane.

A clique of NDP politicians created this on their own:

From the DailyNewsEgypt:

CAIRO: An NGO was recently launched to repair relations between Egypt’s citizens and its police force, it was announced Thursday.

Named “Police and People” and created by former Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher, the organization aims to bridge the ever widening gap between the police and citizens, as well as foster awareness about the proper role for each.