No use filing complaints
צילום: מונט גלפז
Law enforcement collapse
In Israel 2008, criminals are heroes who go unpunished because of State’s incompetence
The law enforcement establishment in my country is collapsing.
This past Friday, my daughter took my car and drove to the beach with her friends. A thief came along, broke my car’s window, along with the windows of 10 other vehicles that parked there, and stole a few things from each car. Sunday morning I went to the insurance company’s garage to fix my car’s window. I found dozens of other cars there with an identical story.
Yet nobody filed a complaint with the police, because they know it’s a waste of time. After all, the police won’t be catching the thieves.
Police Commissioner Dudi Cohen says that 30% of crimes in Israel are not reported, so they do not appear in the statistics. Thirty percent of citizens do not go to the police because the last time they were there, nothing came out of it and the police failed to solve the crime.
So the police may be alright, and the prosecutor’s office may be alright, and the courts are perhaps also alright, yet in Israel 2008 crime defeats the police. The head of the police’s investigation division, Yohanan Danino, said two weeks ago that only one out of every 100 crimes is solved, with the criminal being convicted. Seven out of every 100 face trial and only one is convicted. In fact, 99% of all crimes go unpunished.
This means that the law enforcement establishment in my country mostly specializes in issuing parking tickets.
No budget for real cops
The criminals are barely indicted. And when they do face the courts, they win, because their lawyers defeat the prosecutor’s office. They win because the police or prosecutors screwed up in the investigation or during the trial, and because of a thousand other reasons that turn the thieves into big heroes driving a black Mercedes.The police and prosecutors refer to them as “crime organizations” and give the units that try to do something about them flashy names so we think they’re like top commando units. Yet this does not help the State win.
The time has come for the police and Tax Authority and prosecutor’s office to join forces and decide on how to rebuild a system that would address rising crime, enable the State to defeat the criminals, and regain the public’s trust in the law enforcement establishment.
For the time being, the State loses to the criminals because they and their lawyers are more professional than the prosecutor’s office and police, who recruit 18-year-old kids that the army gave up on because there is no budget for real cops.
