Margalit: If the government would invest the same amount of money in education and social welfare, the results would be 10 times better than the money that is being invested in police stations.
East Jerusalem residents and community leaders uniformly expressed distaste on Wednesday over police plans to markedly increase its presence in the troubled sector with 1,200 extra officers and five new stations.
Citing an already heightened police presence in the eastern portion of the capital, Amin, a 24-year-old accountant and Silwan resident, who requested his last name not be published, said additional officers will make a “bad situation even worse.”
“It’s a big problem because we are the Arab people here and we think this is an occupation, and adding more police stations here will not make the situation good,” said Amin, while waiting for a bus near Damascus Gate.
“It is a mistake because when I see more police, I think, OK, they will close our streets, they will come into our homes, and I will have to leave for work an hour earlier because there will be more checkpoints.”
Dima Asfour, 29, of Beit Safafa, a community worker in the Old City’s Muslim Quarter, echoed Amin’s sentiments, noting that the already heightened police presence there has been futile.
“We are not shocked by this, but it will choke us even more,” said Asfour. “We are already choking inside the Old City and inside Jerusalem.
Every meter we walk, we just see a soldier or more police, and they think it’s security, but it’s not security at all. We feel more endangered.
“There’s no place in the world where you walk on the street and see as many police as this, so it’s weird; it’s not security at all for us. Maybe in their minds it’s secure for them, but it’s not secure for us, because their existence is giving a chance for something bad to happen.”
“More police, more problems,” summarized Asfour.
“More soldiers, more problems.”
Muhammad Deckeideck, 18, a student from Wadi Joz, described the move as an overreaction and a provocation.
“They overreact to everything and think that everything they see with their eyes they can supervise and take immediate action to control the situation,” said Deckeideck.
“But actually, the more police there are, people get antagonized more. As you saw a few months ago during this revolution, they think they need to put more pressure on the people so that anyone who tries to do anything will think a thousand more times about doing it.
“But the [Arab] people are not interested in doing anything that will make the police’s lives harder, or harder on themselves…. It will make things more difficult when police are all over, because it makes people feel afraid and suspicious, even if they are not doing anything wrong. People think that if they are being watched, they are going to suspect me, search me and make my day harder. So I don’t think it will help.”
“They could use the money to fix the streets and improve our education,” he said.
Former east Jerusalem portfolio head in the municipality Meir Margalit concurred.
“If the government would invest the same amount of money in education and social welfare, the results would be 10 times better than the money that is being invested in police stations,” he said.
As reported by The Jerusalem Post