Show me the evidence, just not the incriminating photos

Police internal affairs diligently investigates a complaint about police brutality, omitting one minor detail: the incriminating photos provided by the complainant.

By Yossi Gurvitz

Illustrative photo of an Israeli Border Police officer confronting a Palestinian protester. (Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)
Illustrative photo of an Israeli Border Police officer confronting a Palestinian protester. (Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

In December 2014 a demonstration was held on Route 60 in the West Bank, near the Tunnels Checkpoint separating Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Palestinians were protesting the death of Minister Ziad Abu Ein, who died three days earlier — on International Human Rights Day — a short while after he was photographed being choked by an Israeli Border Police officer during a demonstration against the illegal outpost of Adei Ad.

During the protest, Youssef Abu Maria was approached by a Border Policeman who, without any provocation on Abu Maria’s part, hit him forcefully in the chest. Abu Maria lost consciousness and was evacuated to a nearby hospital.

Three weeks later Abu Maria lodged a complaint with the Department of Internal Police Investigations (Internal Affairs) against the policemen who assaulted him. He attached to the complaint the medical documents indicating the treatment he received. Along with his complaint, Abu Maria noted that he had photos in his possession identifying the suspect who had assaulted him.

While it took the investigation four months to summon Abu Maria and take his statement, from that point Internal Affairs acted quickly and almost efficiently. The investigator sent a memo to the person in charge of the security cameras at the checkpoint on May 27, two days after taking Abu Maria’s statement. However, the latter replied that, unfortunately, the data on the cameras is only kept for two weeks and at that point, six months had passed since the assault. A shame. It could have been useful.

After that the investigator diligently interviewed a series of witnesses: policemen who saw nothing, a cop who claimed that Abu Maria was “pretending,” a civilian who also saw nothing and another civilian who testified that Abu Maria was indeed assaulted without any reason. Following the investigation – the very existence of which is remarkable given that Internal Affairs closes a third of its cases without any investigative action (Hebrew) – the investigator reached the conclusion that he was unable to identify a suspect. He closed the case on grounds all too known to readers of my blog posts for Yesh Din: “unknown perpetrator”.

Hold it!

Let’s rewind to the original complaint Abu Maria lodged in January 2015. He expressly said he had pictures of the policeman who assaulted him. He is also convinced that he noted their existence during the testimony he gave the investigator in May of that year. The investigator did not bother looking at them.

One of the least expected jobs human rights organizations have performed over the last decade has been supplying Israeli authorities with evidence. We and the good people in the other human rights organizations do this time after time; we are always happy to provide the authorities with the evidence they did not manage to collect themselves (without having to make any special effort to obtain it ourselves). So we did that this time as well. In April 2016, Adv. Emily Schaeffer Omer-Man of our legal team appealed Internal Affairs’ decision to close the case without looking at the photos. She attached them to the appeal, for their convenience.

Now we hope the police investigators will understand that there is a fundamental problem with saying a suspect cannot be fingered when there are photos of said suspect. We hope they will act swiftly to identify and locate the suspect (the diligent investigator already identified the Border Police units present during the protest), and then carry out the investigative steps necessary to bring about justice.

The pictures are on us. The ball is now in your court.

Written by Yossi Gurvitz in his capacity as a blogger for Yesh Din, Volunteers for Human Rights. A version of this post was first published on Yesh Din’s blog.