Israeli Press
Yair Golan promises a billion shekels against crime in Arab communities
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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The Democrats launched an emergency programme against organised crime in Arab society at a party event in Nazareth on Monday, budgeted at a billion shekels, the Israeli daily Maariv reported.
The party's own count, cited at the launch, is 889 people killed in the community during the present government's term, 49 of them children.
The plan its leader Yair Golan set out would convene a crime cabinet weekly and stand up a national task force in the new government's first week, drawing five percent of the senior ranks of the police, the Shin Bet, the army and the prison service into a dedicated operations room.
It would build specialised courts for the gravest offences under the slogan "from arrest to prison within nine months", legislate minimum sentences, add biometric tools, and open a financial unit against the funding of criminal organisations with the finance ministry, the Bank of Israel and foreign counterparts.
"We will demand the internal security portfolio, and lead the most far-reaching programme there has been here against the crime organisations," Golan said.
Palestinian citizens of Israel have demanded exactly this for years, through a killing rate that set records in 2023 and has not returned to earlier levels, and through repeated findings that police clear a small fraction of the cases.
The portfolio Golan is asking for is currently held by Itamar Ben Gvir. What the Democrats have published is a costed platform commitment, eleven weeks before the vote, and not yet a policy anyone has funded.
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