The State Comptroller's report on the performance of the Israel Police during Operation Guardian of the Walls in mixed Jewish-Arab cities won't surprise anyone who was here one year and two months ago: Even in real-time as the events were unfolding, it was clear the police was experiencing a fundamental breakdown which, if not immediately fixed, will be more detrimental in the future by orders of magnitude.
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The comptroller went into lengthy detail about the mishaps, listing each and every one of them. They occurred in almost every area – from the way the various police stations functioned on the ground (their size, suitability to their task, their manpower structure, and even the lack of Arabic-speaking officers); to intelligence matters (or more precisely, the lack of intelligence, intelligence officers, and professional intelligence analysts); logistics; data collection and preservation (there isn't even agreement on the number of people who were detained and questioned); reserves; deficient, faulty analysis of the situation in real-time; to learning and applying the obvious lessons.
Not all of the lessons and responsibilities fall on the police's doorstep. The Shin Bet's real-time assessments were found to be lacking, and mainly – as an agency that poorly coordinated and allocated areas of jurisdiction with the Israel Police, which impaired its ability to provide a fitting response to the events. Officials in both organizations reject the findings and say their cooperation is good and professional; but judging by the results, it seems they should prefer the comptroller's conclusions, otherwise we'd have to wonder about the gap between the quality of their work and the actual outcome on the ground.
Although the report is detailed and professional, we need to take a bird's eye view. All of the faults, of course, need to be addressed and fixed, but the bottom line – or the top line – is the most critical: The Israel Police is too small to carry out its designated tasks, and is minuscule in relation to the challenges it can expect to face in times of emergency. It has deep-rooted budgetary, manpower, training, and command quality problems, which if unfixed will cause immense damage.
The police alone cannot solve all of these issues. Responsibility for the police falls on the government, which for many years intentionally drained the organization, avoided appointing a commissioner, and generally did everything to diminish it, figuratively and literally. All citizens can feel this accumulative impact every single day, with the shortage of officers capable of responding in a timely manner, insufficient capacity to contend with crime and violence in the Arab sector, and the wholesale resignation of cops who no longer wish to belong or be associated with a sullied organization with a terrible reputation.
In other words, the Israel Police is a victim of purposeful abuse, the immediate result of which is the deterioration of the service it provides to the people. Although the comptroller focused his report on the events in the mixed cities, he equally could have written the same report about the police's performance and capabilities in ordinary times in almost every city or district in the country. Even worse, had reports been published accumulatively, year after year, the comptroller would have discovered that instead of trending toward improvement, the police is actually going backward – a direct result of a chronic lack of police stations and officers, funds, and government plans to address the root problems.
The mixed cities are an excellent example of this. The comptroller is focused on the security forces, but the problem runs far deeper and includes elements of employment rates, education, welfare, and more. For the police to be able to meet the challenge, it needs active help from the assortment of government ministries, which are supposed to be an integral part of the national response to the problem.
In the meantime, this isn't happening, and the future consequences will be severe. The events of Operation Guardian of the Walls were a wake-up call, which thus far really hasn't woken anybody up. Despite the report and its findings, progress on the ground remains sluggish. If the State of Israel doesn't come to its senses by strengthening the police (and establishing apparatuses to reinforce it in times of emergency, such as immediately forming a national guard), the comptroller's current report will look like a walk in the park compared to the report he will write after the next campaign.
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