More money, less security

The police budget bluff and the incentive trap

- • By TAMIR DORTEL

ISRAEL POLICE officers are seen at the scene where a man was found dead after being stabbed outside a nightclub in Tel Aviv, last Friday. Any police reform that focuses only on "more money" is doomed to failure, the writer says.

((Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90))

In any private business, if you doubled the budget and got a decrease in output, the CEO would be fired. In the Israel Police and justice system, it's exactly the opposite: failure is the engine for requesting more budgets.

The data prove that the problem is not the "starvation" of the system but a distorted incentive structure that causes the officer, prosecutor, and judge to prefer their industrial peace over your security.

One of the painful truths is that there is no connection between the amount of money poured into a public system and the results it produces. The Israel Police is a living and bleeding example of this.

The narrative that "the system is starved" is an absolute lie. The facts, as the Finance Ministry knows well, tell a different story: the police budget has more than doubled - from NIS 7.5 billion in 2015 to NIS 17b. today. Where did the money go? Not to patrol cars and not to technology, but to inflating pensions and salaries: 76% of the budget.