In any private business, if you doubled the budget and got a decrease in output, the CEO would be fired. In the Israel Police and justice system, it’s exactly the opposite: failure is the engine for requesting more budgets.
The data prove that the problem is not the “starvation” of the system but a distorted incentive structure that causes the officer, prosecutor, and judge to prefer their industrial peace over your security.
One of the painful truths is that there is no connection between the amount of money poured into a public system and the results it produces. The Israel Police is a living and bleeding example of this.
The narrative that “the system is starved” is an absolute lie. The facts, as the Finance Ministry knows well, tell a different story: the police budget has more than doubled – from NIS 7.5 billion in 2015 to NIS 17b. today. Where did the money go? Not to patrol cars and not to technology, but to inflating pensions and salaries: 76% of the budget.
So why is our personal security at rock bottom? The answer lies in my favorite concept: incentives. Every player in the system, from the clerk at the station to the Supreme Court judge, operates within a mechanism that punishes them for hard work and rewards them for “closing cases.”
A factory for producing paperwork, not justice
Look at the numbers: the police receive about 400,000 complaints per year. For the investigations officer, an open file is a “debt” that clouds the statistics. A closed file is a bureaucratic success. The result? About 60% of cases are closed for lack of evidence.
The state comptroller revealed an amazing statistic: Some 21,000 cases per year are opened and closed without the suspect even being questioned or knowing that a case was opened against him. This is not law enforcement: this is bureaucracy for its own sake.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Police Commissioner Daniel Levy must understand: You cannot fix this with more positions; you need to change the metric. As long as a police officer is measured on closing cases and not on reducing crime, reality will not change.
The Carmel Market of the courts
The disease continues to the prosecution and the courts. Only about 15% of cases mature into an indictment. And what happens then? The justice system, which claims to be collapsing under the load (a partly correct claim, resulting from desperate inefficiency), has established a “secondary market” for punishment: plea bargains.
The vast majority of cases – some 82% – end in a deal. This means that the price of crime in Israel is “on clearance sale.” A criminal knows that even if caught, the chance of sitting in prison is low, and the punishment will be ridiculous. Justice Minister Yariv Levin needs to deal with this no less than with the appointment of judges: the courts in Israel, out of rationality of overload, have become factories for closing cases instead of halls of justice.
The Israel Prison Service paradox
But the peak of absurdity is found at the end of the chain: in the prisons. Here we meet Thomas Sowell’s “law of unintended consequences” in its full glory.
On the one hand, parole boards (operating with discretion) have almost stopped deducting a third, out of fear (risk aversion) that a criminal will be released and commit crime again. On the other hand, the state releases thousands of prisoners in massive and arbitrary “administrative releases.” Why? Because the Supreme Court ruled that there must be a minimum living space for each prisoner.
This is an example I bring up in lectures, and I am always amazed by the reactions – that in order to meet the Supreme Court’s humanitarian standard, we are throwing dangerous criminals onto the street before their time. This is a classic example of detached judicial activism that abandons public security in the name of supposedly enlightened values.
Change incentives, not budget
The failure is institutional. The system has built itself a golden cage in which no one pays the price for rising crime – not the officer who didn’t investigate, not the prosecutor who closed a deal, and not the judge who merely sentenced community service. Any reform that focuses only on “more money” is doomed to failure. The fix will only come when we move to measuring outputs, cancel the revolving door of the courts, and return deterrence to center stage.
The writer is an attorney and creator of the On Meaning podcast. He can be reached at: Tamir@mashma.net