How the project began
The story begins in the spring of 2012, when Eduard Stander — concerned about rising crime and the safety of his family — became involved in community crime fighting and joined his local Community Police Forum.
Community WhatsApp groups had become an important way for neighbourhoods to organise. Eduard noticed that these groups held valuable information about criminal or suspicious activity involving vehicles. He began processing the information manually and saw that the same vehicles could move from suburb to suburb.
As more groups and larger volumes of information became impossible to manage manually, automated processing was introduced. Vehicle-related intelligence was stored centrally so it could be searched by people involved in community safety.
From community initiative to wider network
NP Tracker started in 2014 to support community crime-fighting groups. It expanded beyond its local origins to recognise registration formats across South Africa and the Southern African Development Community region, excluding personalised plate formats.
The project developed interfaces for messaging platforms, Android scanning applications, cloud tools and API integration with automatic number plate recognition systems. It remains focused on securely retrieving vehicle-related lookout context when a registration is checked.
Purpose and principles
- Help communities access relevant vehicle intelligence when they need it.
- Protect sources and avoid publishing a general list of registrations.
- Do not sell or share user details for marketing.
- Do not send unsolicited promotional messages.
- Credit contributing organisations when the original lookout identifies them.
- Investigate reported errors and correct records where appropriate.