Menachem Amir

Community policing in Israel

The Israeli National Police began to implement community policing on a large scale in January of 1995. In this paper we describe the main findings of a three year national evaluation of community policing in Israel that was initiated by the Chief Scientist’s office of the Israeli police in the Fall of 1996. When community policing was envisioned and planned in Israel it was seen as part of a total reformation of the Israeli police in structure, philosophy and action. Our research suggests that this broad idea of community policing was not implemented in Israel, and indeed the program of community policing was found to lose ground during the course of our study. While community policing did have specific impacts on the Israeli police, it did not fundamentally change the perspectives and activities of street level police officers. We explain the difficulties encountered in the implementation of community policing in reference to three factors: the speed of implementation of the program; the resistance of traditional military style organizational culture within the Israeli police to the demands of community policing models; and a lack of organizational commitment to community policing. In our conclusions we argue that these barriers to successful community policing are not unique to the Israel case, and are indeed likely to be encountered in the development of community policing in many other countries.

Ecstasy in Israel and Abroad

The purpose of this paper is twofold: to describe the Israeli XTC market from the perspective of supply and demand, and to delineate the role of Israelis in the production and distribution of XTC outside of Israel.

Motivation for Recreational Marijuana

The paper tells a known story: the struggle for decriminalization of hashish and marijuana use. Although the authors bluntly express their demand for tolerance towards the consumption of these ”soft drugs” and possible damage due to their use, they call for ”harm reduction” policy and programs. It should be remembered that the use or abuse of drugs has become a hot topic with enormous budgets for scholars in the fields of law, criminology, and social and political sciences. The amount of data on the deleterious effects of drug use, including hashish and marijuana, is continuously accumulating. The authors of the paper define these data and the prohibitionist approach as a ”moral panic,” that is, creating a phantom of social dangers and a stigma of deviants for those defined as ”drug abusers.” Furthermore, they maintain that the media and social research contribute to this panic. The authors do not analyze who takes part in this stigma contest, creating or rejecting the panic, and why, as well as the interests they defend or promote. The methodology of the paper is also problematic. The qualitative approach, executed through interviews, is a suitable procedure for gaining deep insight into the issues addressed by the researchers. But alas, they reflect the position of a small number of mainly older but also young, middle-class persons who support almost wholeheartedly liberal tolerant attitudes toward the use of ”soft drugs.” Thus the possibility of generalization is limited. Although they repeatedly claim the positive effects of marijuana use, some do admit that may be negative health and psychological consequences. Furthermore, there is no mention of the fact that the potency of these drugs is not constant, but rising, and that it is impossible to detect and predict who will suffer negatively from the use or abuse of the drugs, and that continuous use can cause addiction. The paper does not present the background or the context of the use of marijuana in the Canadian scene, only alluding to the counter culture of certain parts of Canadian culture. The authors repeatedly emphasize the recreational conscious expansion effects of marijuana use, but did not ask their subjects about the negative effects of the drugs. Those