Police

What do you call it?

It’s startling sometimes the difference an hour or two can make. Wednesday went from a quiet morning with my infant daughter and not much happening in Israel, to a gunfight on the Egypt border between smugglers and IDF troops, and then, later in the day, a deadly attack in Jerusalem in which a Palestinian man rammed his car into passengers at a light rail stop, killing a 3-month-old girl and wounding 8 others. From that point on a familiar scene played …

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The Popo conference call has problems

Somebody’s dog won’t shut the fuck up, and some fool – let’s call him Amichai – keeps dropping in and out of the conference call, bringing things to a halt each time. Once a week or so the Israel Police hold a conference call with crime reporters from all the national outlets. It’s usually when a big story breaks, or before a gag order is lifted, and they want to make sure everybody has the police narrative and the chance to …

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On Price Tag attacks, tough talk and weak suggestions

  Carmi Gillon is not impressed. Following a series of “Price Tag” attacks (acts of vandalism or violence directed at Arabs, often in response to Israeli government policy in the Palestinian Territories) within the Green Line, the former Shin Bet Chief said Israel could stop the attacks if the authorities really wanted to and that like the agency dealt with the Jewish underground when he was in charge, they could do the same if they just had the willpower. “We don’t …

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Facebooking the underworld

Not long before his legs would be blown off in a car bomb in Ashkelon last night, Dror Damari took to Facebook to wish his friends a good week. Over the course of the next day, around a dozen people left condolence notes on the post, most wishing the newly paraplegic young man a healthy recovery, as he lay in the trauma ward of Ashkelon’s Barzilay Hospital. Damari, reportedly an associate of mobster Shalom Domrani, did not have a locked Facebook …

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Snuff photos and gag orders in the age of the smart phone

A smartphone was burning a hole in someone’s pocket on Saturday as he (or she) stood over the headless and dismembered body of a young woman dumped in a suitcase next to the Hagana train station in south Tel Aviv. Moments later there was a picture, and within a day, the shot and a few others went viral on WhatsApp on a cellular collision course violating with impunity a police gag order – one that restricted the release of information on …

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Four years in the making

When the full details of the Bar Noar case are cleared for publication, probably sooner rather than later, it will be one of the strangest and most lurid crime cases written in Israel in years. Surprising and terribly tragic, the current police case against the three main suspects and an LGBT activist involved in the story runs counter, though maybe not entirely, to what many assumed was a hate crime against the community. In the almost four years since Nir Katz, …

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The usual suspects

Minutes after reports that shots were fired in a small Beersheba bank branch on Monday, wide swaths of the Israeli media had already ID’d the suspects: two young men from Rahat, a Beduin city of around 50,000 people, some 15 miles outside of town. Within a half hour or so, a southern district police spokesman stated that the shooter was a resident of the city, a 40-year-old Jewish man, and that he apparently acted alone. As the day progressed, a picture …

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The Pyongyang District Police and the Tel Aviv press walkout

This could have been a scene straight out of North Korea, or at least that’s what a few of the crime reporters present said. What should have been an event to honor Tel Aviv’s cops had become a love-in for Israel Police Commissioner Yohanan Danino. Before Israel’s top cop took to the podium, three cherubic little children clad in Tel Aviv Police t-shirts beamed towards the crowd of some 300 uniformed police. “Who’s the most handsome cop? The commissioner!” one child …

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Not quite friends – riding around with Tel Aviv police detectives

“You see that guy, something’s wrong with that guy,” said “Ronen” a detective from the Lev Tel Aviv police station during a ride-around I went on for a couple hours last week as part of a story on the strangely legal and highly potent drugs sold at Tel Aviv kiosks. “Why? Is it the hat?” I asked, savoring the rare opportunity to be on the other end of the police gaze. “No, it’s how he’s walking. He’s walking but not going …

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Popo beepers, and the WhatsApp insurgency

I first got a pager in 1995. I was 16, and there was little need for me to have one. Occasionally I’d get a page, 911 at the end if it was important, and then hustle to the nearest pay phone to make a call. If I was being honest, probably 9 out of 10 pages were from my dad. Fifteen years later, I got a pager again, but this time, owing to the efficiency of The Jerusalem Post, I have …

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