Is anyone ashamed?

He's alone, hiding somewhere out there, and the entire police, with helicopters, horses, cruisers, motorcycles and thousands of blue uniforms and Border Guard police officers are helpless – they do not know how to handle this shame.

The police, who are unable to guard dangerous criminals and who are unable to find them, are certainly able to tell nice stories and lay the blame on others. The Tel Aviv Police District leaked, throughout the morning, information slamming the Prison Service.

Journalists heard whispers that a day before the escape, Benny Sela handed out his cigarettes to his fellow prisoners. "That's a sign he planned his escaped," those behind the leaks rejoiced. "The Prison Service's intelligence service screwed up and didn't know about it." That's a nice story; it's a pity that Benny Sela doesn't smoke and has no cigarettes to hand out.

According to another leak, he handed out his clothes to his prison friends. Another nice story, but the clothes were found yesterday folded in his cell. And another fact worth noting: Nachshon, the Prison service's "commando unit," transferred Benny Sela handcuffed and chained from Eshel prison to Nitzan prison. He did not escape while in Nachshon's hands.

He escaped from those who took him in the morning from the Nitzan prison to the court in Tel Aviv. He escaped while in the hands of the prisoner escort unit of the Tel Aviv police, a pathetic unit – the district commander knows that it is like that and has done very little to improve it.

Nobody apologizes here

Absurdly, we should all be thanking the labor court official who by mistake sent Benny Sela a summon to court. Thanks to her, the police's incompetence was exposed; thanks to her, we know there's no one to count on.

We don't need a commission of inquiry to rule that the police are 100 percent guilty of this failure. The Tel Aviv police, through criminal negligence, allowed a dangerous criminal to escape and is now unable to find him, begging for the public's help and dispatching hundreds of police officers over any small piece of information – those officers are running around backyards as if they were drugged mice.

It's logical to assume that Benny Sela will be arrested soon, because he has no one to assist his escape quest. His expected capture, however, must not erase the failure.

The minister in charge of the police, Avi Dichter, was right to appoint a police-free commission of inquiry in order to look into what really happened here. Even before the committee, led by Amos Yaron, started its work, senior police officials were already disparaging it with comments like "what does a major general in the military know about police matters."

Indeed, one doesn't need to be a major general to see the failure. Any child can see the police screwed up big time and not only two clumsy cops. Not only those two are guilty, but also those that allowed such tattered unit to be responsible for dangerous criminals in their district and their police.

Benny Sela turned police into a laughing stock, and police's failures brought fear back to the streets of Tel Aviv. Had this happened in Guiliani's New York, the entire police top brass would have resigned immediately. Because of the shame. Here we have shame too, but we don't have anyone who feels ashamed. Nobody apologizes here and quits.