Top cop apologizes for Ethiopian comments, insists he was misunderstood

Police Commissioner Roni Alsheich apologized late Thursday for comments he made earlier in the week that many in Israel’s Ethiopian Jewish community saw as justifying discriminatory police practices toward them.

On Tuesday, at a speech to the Israel Bar Association, Israel’s top cop said that studies worldwide have shown that crime rates are higher among immigrant populations, and that it was thus only “natural” for law enforcement officers to be more suspicious of recent immigrants, including Ethiopian-Israelis, than of other citizens.

“When a police officer comes across a suspicious person [who is either young or from an immigrant background, or both], his brain naturally suspects him more than if [the suspect] were someone else,” he said.

Alsheich went on to explain that this tendency among police to associate immigrants with crime led to “overpolicing” and friction with those communities, and boasted of steps he has taken as police commissioner, together with Ethiopian community leaders, to combat that tendency and reduce tensions.

Ethiopian activists and leaders charged that the police chief had justified discrimination on the part of cops.

Alsheich has vehemently denied the accusation, saying he did not justify discrimination and “overpolicing,” but had merely tried to understand the phenomenon in order to combat it.

In a Thursday evening meeting of the joint coordinating committee of Ethiopian Jewish leaders and top police officers, Alsheich said he wanted to apologize “to the entire community of Ethiopian heritage and anyone who felt hurt from the media reports.”

According to a police statement, he insisted he did not intend to cause hurt, “but to raise an issue as a first step toward finding agreed-upon solutions.”

The meeting itself was scheduled weeks earlier, police said, and was in any case slated to discuss “ways to rein in overpolicing and reduce crime among youth.”

Alsheich also promised at the meeting that he would order all of Israel’s police districts to reexamine police case files in a bid to find instances in which overpolicing, rather than actual criminal activity, had led to an arrest. The goal, he said, would be the “closure of as many cases as possible.”

According to police figures, the past nine months saw a 20 percent drop in cases opened for members of the Ethiopian community compared to the same period last year.

Alsheich faced withering criticism following the Tuesday comments, with many activists interviewed on primetime news broadcasts charging that his careless words reflected a general blindness in the police force to the widespread experience of discrimination faced by dark-skinned youth in their encounters with cops.

On Wednesday, Ethiopian soldiers serving as reservists in elite units penned a letter to IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot saying they would not turn up for duty any longer following Alsheich’s remarks.

“We’re sick of the state’s demand that we continue to honor a contract according to which we are citizens with obligations but not rights,” the reservists wrote, according to a Channel 10 report.

Signatories included fighters from the Golani, Givati and Paratroopers infantry brigades, as well as elite specialized units such as Maglan.

“We will be expressing our discomfort through organized actions of civil disobedience, the first of which will be our refusal to report for reserve duty,” they wrote.

Alsheich charged on Wednesday that his comments were intentionally misrepresented by “a small group of agitators” who were causing “huge damage.”

Ethiopian-Israelis have long accused the police of brutality and abuse against members of their community. Last year, the community staged a series of mass demonstrations across the country, triggered by video footage showing a seemingly unprovoked police assault on an Ethiopian-Israeli soldier last April.