Analysis / Not an intelligent move

Some senior police officials wondered out loud if the killing of innocent civilians in yesterday's botched gangland assassination attempt on Ze'ev Rosenstein will change what they called stubborn, outdated conceptions in their organization.

Yesterday's attack on Rosenstein at a Yehuda Halevy Street money exchange shop in Tel Aviv was just the latest in a series of events that apparently have proven the failure of the police's approach, from the commissioner to the intelligence department - which is separated from the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) - and the failure to form a professional unit to fight organized crime.

What is on the police's agenda? An economic unit, which despite the high-flying terminologies, is meant to deal with people trying to maneuver between the state's economic authorities. The intifada years have been a "golden" era for both large and small crime organizations that are often national in scope, reaching beyond cities and towns and beyond districts.

They expanded illegal gambling enterprises, essentially took over the construction sand industry - stealing sea sand wherever they found it - tightened their ties with the gray lending market, learned how to run extortion protection rackets, and heavily entered the sex slave industry by trading women. During this time, the police invested most of their efforts on the national security problem, which only deteriorated.

This has had a terrible impact on the police's image, which is important for the sake of public confidence. Tel Aviv Police Chief Yossi Sedbone and other commanders have learned to recite cliches as they stand beside charred buses with the cries of the wounded in the background. "It's impossible to stop the lone terrorist," Commissioner Shlomo Aharonishki often says, and the public does not blame the police for the attacks: The police are not to blame for the absence of a security fence on the border.

But now, the police's upper echelons know there's no single agency within the force that can be assigned the task of eradicating the underworld gangs. In 2000 and 2001, the police did not have the time or resources to investigate the undercurrents of the underworld families and their rivalries. As long as their wars did not harm innocent bystanders - "civilians" - the issue was not a priority given the weekly security crises arising from terror alerts and terror successes. Therefore, the "good families" understood that the police would not interfere in their battles, and it did not take long for crowded streets to become the scenes of potential combat between gangs.

The original sin, police sources say, was the separation of the intelligence branch from the investigations branch and the placing of a commander at its head. Critics at the time said the move was meant only to create a job for a veteran officer, and not enough thought was devoted to the implications of such a decision. Now, at every level of the police - from the police station all the way to the fifth floor at national headquarters - the move is regarded as a failure.

Detectives step on intelligence officers' feet, and junior intelligence officers, who don't always understand their roles, step on detectives' feet. How, those in the police ask, could the core - intelligence gathering - be removed from the investigations department?

For years, intelligence was headed by Commander Haim Klein, who is regarded as the officer to blame for the sad state of police intelligence work. Aharonishki found it impossible to dismiss him until former public security minister Uzi Landau made him director-general of the ministry.

Klein was replaced by the energetic Ilan Franco, who insisted that the separation from CID was great for the department. But Commander Moshe Mizrahi, head of CID, argued that it was a disaster in the war against organized crime. The money that went into the new department could have been used for a national-level unit, along the model of the FBI, that would fight organized crime. Such a unit would cull all the information about various crime families - the Rosensteins, Abirjils, Cocoons, Alperons and others - and fight them, using undercover agents, ambushes and all the other means at the police's disposal.

There aren't even very many families to keep track of. All are known to the police, which simply does not know how to deal with them. Instead of a national unit, Franco invented the concept of the "central unit" in each district - his "scouts." Aside from ongoing district work, Franco gave each central unit a crime family to cover. The unit's detectives are supposed to gather information about the crime family and pass it on to the national intelligence department, which then is supposed to order enforcement procedures across the country. That was Franco's way of handling crime that crosses district lines.

Many in the police say Franco's system has failed, and is what led to last week's arrest of Rosenstein on suspicion of hiring a contract killer, only for him to be released after a few days when it turned out the killer, David Atias, was lying. The lack of coordination between the Haifa and Tel Aviv central units led, among other things, to Rosenstein's hearing on the radio that he was about to be arrested.

Instead of a unit to fight organized crime, the police are putting the final touches on their "economic crimes" unit. The unit is Aharonishki's pet project and is meant to deal with people trying to cheat the state's economic authorities for the sake of their businesses, and will operate like a white collar petty crime unit.