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Friday, February 12, 2010

This May Be Why Police Don't Respond So Vigorously Against Settler Violence

Apparently the West Bank (i.e. Judea and Samaria) police are under a major torrent of abusive phone calls from Palestinians.

From The Jerusalem Post:

“Without the screening, we would be getting 90,000 to 100,000 bad calls a month,” Carmeli said. The calls range from personally abusive to threats of terrorist attacks, he added.

“We often hear people cursing our sisters and mothers. Sometimes we get callers threatening to blow us up or carry out a suicide bomb attack,”
...
“Efforts to trace the call continue until we can determine whether it is a real threat or not,” he added.

With 50-60 percent of all calls coming into headquarters being abusive, and operators fielding an average of 1,500 bogus calls a month, Carmeli said the problem has “really harmed our ability to respond to calls.

Operators get 50 such calls a day, and assuming an 8 hour shift, that's like one every 7 or 8 minutes.

I understand that many Palestinians have legitimate reasons to be angry at the police, but this is just a terrible, terrible idea; one can be pretty certain that this sort of thing affects the ability and willingness/promptness of the police to respond to the very real and very disgusting problem of settler violence.