High Court strikes down police ‘racial profiling’ procedure

The High Court of Justice on Sunday struck down two clauses of the police code of regulations that allowed officers to demand to see identity documents of an individual without cause.

The decision is the culmination of a years-long legal battle by several civil rights groups, which alleged that the clauses in question enabled police to use racial profiling to stop citizens, demand to see ID, and interrogate them.

The opinion for the unanimous ruling was written by Justice Yael Willner, with Supreme Court President Isaac Amit and Justice David Mintz concurring.

The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), one of the primary petitioners in the case, welcomed the decision as a “historic ruling” that would prevent “arbitrary” police demands for individuals to show ID based merely on their outward appearance, in particular specific ethnic groups in Israel such as Arabs, and Ethiopian and Mizrahi Jews.

In 2019, ACRI, together with the Association of Ethiopian Jews and other groups, filed a petition to the High Court asking it to bar police from stopping people in the street for the purpose of presenting ID, without any suspicion of them having committed a crime.

The petition argued that the police’s “years-long” practice of stopping people “just due to their subjective feeling that they seem ‘problematic,’” and then checking the information held in the police database based on their identity documents, violated key rights, including that state authorities not automatically view citizens as suspects.

The organizations also argued that the practice was implemented on the basis of racial profiling of minority communities, fostering resentment and causing social unrest.

In January 2021, the court ruled partially in favor of the petition, and determined that police officers were legally entitled to demand to see someone’s ID without a suspicion that a crime had been committed, but only in order to check the information in the police database — without conducting any interrogation.

The police subsequently published their new procedures for such circumstances in February 2022, but ACRI, together with the other organizations, again filed a petition to the High Court claiming that the new procedures contravened the explicit orders of the court’s 2019 ruling.

Specifically, the petition said that the police procedure allowed officers to inspect a person’s identity documents “for a wide variety of reasons,” and ignored the ruling’s determination that officers were not entitled to carry out any other police procedure after having demanded the ID, such as further checks and interrogation.

The petition also noted that the new police procedure had no instruction at all prohibiting further police actions after requesting the documents, and even permitted such actions.

In Sunday’s ruling, the High Court struck down two clauses in the police procedures published in 2022.

The court ruled that officers must have a “reasonable foundation for suspicion that a person has committed a crime, or is about to commit a crime,” before demanding to see his identity documents, and that a mere “suspicion” was insufficient.

“This is a historic ruling, which determined that police are not permitted to approach citizens arbitrarily based on their appearance, clothing, and the like,” said Oded Feller, an attorney with the ACRI.

Feller said that the clauses in the police regulations “led to discrimination, humiliation, and over-policing of certain populations such as Ethiopians, Mizrahi [Jews of Middle Eastern heritage], and Arabs,” and said ACRI would monitor the implementation of the ruling.