Who will police the police?

With sexual misconduct allegations shaming its senior brass, the Israel Police is long overdue for a moral reckoning and organizational overhaul

By AMOTZ ASA-EL
YOHANAN DANINO (photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM)
YOHANAN DANINO
(photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM)
HAVING ALREADY humbled King David, Bill Clinton and Moshe Katsav, libido is now rattling the Israel Police, leaving its high command exposed and the Jewish state aghast.
The slew of investigations, resignations and dismissals is about unrelated tales of personal misconduct that collectively allege an organizational culture of abuse that poses a major challenge for Israel’s next government.
For most of his four years as Commissioner, Inspector-General Yohanan Danino faced 15 deputy commissioners in board meetings where he would say “please be seated” before turning, with that forum, to the business of policing the state. Now, seven of those deputy commissioners are suspected of assorted improprieties, five – including Danino’s former deputy – of sex offenses.
Then deputy inspector-general Nissim Mor was questioned in January for 12 hours by the Justice Ministry’s Department of Police Investigations following a harassment complaint by a young policewoman, who had appealed to him for help concerning her job. The 56-year-old Mor, a married father of four and until then a leading contender to succeed Danino, was placed under house arrest and summarily fired.
By March, following the probe in which Mor reportedly admitted to two other relationships with subordinates while claiming they consented and received no reward, the investigators reportedly planned to indict Mor for indecent acts, sexual harassment and breach of trust, as well as obstruction of justice, for having erased relevant phone texts.
While Mor was under house arrest, Coastal Region Commander Hagai Dotan, also a married father of four, was fired following a Justice Ministry investigation into five policewomen’s harassment complaints.
Shortly before this dismissal, Judea and Samaria Commander Kobi Cohen resigned after a Justice Ministry investigation into a relationship with a female subordinate. Though the woman did not complain, others did, and a Facebook correspondence reportedly attested that the deputy commissioner pressured his subordinate to join him on a mission to Poland, adding that “attaching herself” to him would benefit her future.
In September, Jerusalem Region Commander Yosi Parienti, who was also a candidate to succeed Danino, resigned abruptly for “personal reasons,” less than a year after his predecessor as the capital’s top cop, Niso Shaham, was fired and indicted following harassment complaints from several policewomen.
Back in 2010, when deputy commissioner Uri Bar-Lev resigned following a harassment complaint, the incident seemed overblown. Charged by psychologist Orly Innes, who worked at the time as a contractor for Israel Police, Bar-Lev apologized for what the psychologist saw as an indecent pass at her and the case was closed without charges. Bar-Lev even returned briefly to service.
The current crisis is entirely different, however, and should result in major change.
Fortunately, none of the scandals is about rape. Unfortunately, they still unveil a culture of abuse – the abuse of women, abuse of office and abuse of a sociology that trapped lower-class women between powerful superiors’ arms.
The policemen’s typical prey was not Innes, an assertive psychologist with a PhD, who designed a public safety program and sold it to the police. The cops’ victims were generally undereducated women with no professional alternatives and no promotion prospects other than through satisfying their superiors. Add to this the senior cop’s legal, social and financial clout, and you get a recipe for abuse. The women needed the cops, and the cops had good reason to believe no one would know.
In fact, the police is the last holdout of a harassment culture that once thrived in the workplace from politics and government to the military and the arts.
The IDF’s top brass, for instance, after Navy commander Michael Barkai’s dismissal in 1979 following a sexual misconduct court martial, last faced a sex abuse scandal in 1999, when Armored Corps Brigadier-General Nir Galilee’s former secretary charged him with rape.
A court martial acquitted the general of rape, but convicted him of indecent conduct, since he admitted to having had sex with his secretary. A Supreme Court appeal later blocked his promotion to major-general, and he left the army.
It was a message generally well absorbed in the IDF, once notorious as an incubator of reputed women hunters like Moshe Dayan. A similar transition happened in the arts, with actor Hanan Goldblat serving jail time for raping junior actresses, while the same humbling took place in government, with former defense minister Yitzhak Mordechai’s conviction, in 2001, in several harassment cases.
Finally, when former president Moshe Katsav, in 2011, entered the prison cell where he still remains, there was a general impression that an era had ended – that with the ex-president himself behind bars for sex offenses all would understand that times have changed and workplace harassment can be hazardous for anyone’s future.
It now turns out that all understood “the bastards had changed the rules” – all, that is, but the cops. “The police is plagued with sex offenses and exploitation of authority,” charged the head of the Justice Ministry’s Department of Police Investigations, Uri Carmel, whose agency handles complaints against police.
Mixing his metaphors, Carmel gloated that the multiple investigations of seunreported harassments and will result in “a cleaning of the stables.” Though that optimism has yet to materialize, Commissioner Danino’s personal resolve in the unfolding crisis, including firing his own deputy rather than allow him to resign, marks the beginning of a long overdue institutional surgery.
The police’s real surgeon, the one who will follow Danino’s emergency surgery, will arrive once a new government settles in, and will face cops plagued by more than harassment.
Apart from losing five senior cops because of sex-related suspicions, the police lost, in recent months, two deputy commissioners under other circumstances.
Bruno Stein, who headed the Center Region, resigned last fall after revelations he had attended a party hosted by lawyer Ronel Fisher, a suspect in a bribery case involving police officers. And Menashe Arbiv, who headed Lahav 433, which fights organized and white-collar crime, resigned after Yoshiyahu Pinto, a rabbi who admitted to bribing police officers, claimed he bribed Arbiv.
Arbiv, whose duties resembled the head of the FBI’s, denied the allegations flatly and convincingly. Even so, this affair, which is about strange contacts with strange people, adds up to a broader picture of a police organization that some accuse sweepingly of exploiting its women employees; consorting with felons; doing a poor job fighting burglars, dangerous drivers and construction violators; and is in bad need of a moral and professional overhaul.
Such a generalization is unfair.
The police’s job is thankless by any yardstick as it grapples simultaneously with terror incidents, Palestinian disturbances, border patrols, and tense political rallies while also fighting what any police force fights, from illegal immigration, theft, robbery, and organized crime to reckless driving, embezzlement and money laundering.
Complaints about the efficiency with which Israel Police does all this with its 28,000 employees and NIS 9.5 billion budget are legion, but there is no arguing that local cops are in the line of fire much more frequently than police elsewhere.
Moreover, on some fronts, from narcotics to crowd control, their accomplishments have often been impressive.
Even so, besides being an anachronistic bastion of machismo, Israel Police is also arguably cumbersome, overburdened and overly centralized. Overseen during the past six years by Internal Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovich, himself a former deputy commissioner, spending half his 65 years in the police force, the organization’s time-honored structure and duties were not seriously challenged.
Yet, the Israel Police’s imminent shakeup might well demand, besides moral rebooting, also an ambitious restructuring that includes some organizational weight loss. Its own assumption that everything it currently does must forever be done under its one roof might be very wrong.
A commissioner from outside the organization can, for instance, think that national police should focus on national crime and public order, and delegate burglaries, illegal building and domestic violence to municipal police departments, which Israel does not have.
Such ambitious reforms are generally difficult to impose on entrenched, sprawling and omnipotent bureaucracies like the police. Now, this will likely change, because Danino’s fouryear terms ends May 1 and the minister to whom he reports is retiring from politics.
The next minister will first of all have to decide where to search for the new top cop – within the police or outside.
The new commissioner’s agenda will have to be something between reform and revolution. Yet this cannot be assumed in advance, as the next minister might lack the passion and resolve that re-steering an entire police organization demands.
The organization’s resistance was evident last September when Danino, responding to speculation he will be succeeded by a retired IDF general, said his successor should come from within the police’s high command, which at the time had yet to unravel.
Some think that police brass’s opposition to an imported IDF general is about an inferiority complex. That’s unfounded.
Only three of the current deputy commissioners started off within the police – two in the Border Police and one in the elite anti-terror unit Yamam. A fourth, Gila Gaziel, a 27-year veteran in the force, has served continuously in the Human Resources Department she now heads. The rest of the high command started off in the IDF, six of them, including Danino, as combat officers.
One, Traffic Police Commander Yaron Be’eri, headed the IDF’s Personnel Division, retiring as a brigadier-general.
What the top cops fear, then, is not the IDF, but an outsider’s intrusion. However, such an attitude will now be difficult to defend.
An imported commissioner will likely come from the IDF because candidates in the other repository of eligible candidates, the secret services, are not accustomed to the public visibility that the position of commissioner requires.
In the IDF, the supply of eligible candidates, both serving and retired, is abundant, ranging from former deputy chief of staff Yair Naveh and former Central Command head Gadi Shamni to former Air Force commander Ido Nehushtan.
There has been one precedent of a general who was parachuted in to head the police, apart from the case of Yaacov Turner, who was only a brigadier- general in the IDF, and served for five years as deputy commissioner before his appointment in 1993 as inspector- general.
The precedent was in 1980, when major-general Herzl Shafir, previously head of the IDF Southern Command, was appointed police commissioner.
The experiment was 12-months young when Shafir was fired by the minister who hired him, Yosef Burg, who claimed the commissioner lied to him – an explanation few bought, suspecting Shafir was fired because he investigated corruption allegations against Burg’s National Religious Party.
While provoking the politicians above him, General Shafir also unsettled the cops under him, imposing on them a computerization drive that the army had undergone earlier.
It was a brief, stormy, and ill-fated tenure, but one in which the imported commander displayed a kind of independence, courage and scorn for convention that the system refused to digest. Thirty-five years on – the system no longer has such a choice.
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