Dichter: Cops joining crime organizations after leaving force

Former policemen who served in sensitive positions in the Intelligence and Investigations branch of the police are taking jobs with underworld organizations after they leave the force, Public Security Minister Avi Dichter said in a letter released this week.

Dichter was replying to a letter from MK Ophir Paz-Pines, head of the Knesset Internal Affairs and Environment Committee, who had called on the state prosecution and the Ministry of Public Security to introduce a cooling-off period before police officers could start working with criminal lawyers in the private sector.

Pines expressed concern that police officers who had held sensitive positions in the police force and were in possession of information on what the police did and didn't know about underworld figures had been known to start playing for the other side after they left the force.

"The criminal law offices sometimes represent well-known criminals, and try to find every breach in the work of the police and the state prosecution," Pines had written to Dichter. "The movement of police investigators and prosecutors to private criminal law offices is intolerable from [both] a moral and a practical point of view in terms of the fight against crime."

But according to Dichter, the situation is even worse than Paz-Pines had thought. Some of these policemen don't join criminal law offices, but the criminal organizations themselves. Dichter told Paz-Pines that the state prosecution and police have established a committee, led by Attorney Shai Nitzan, head of the Special Tasks Division of the State Attorney's Office, to study the problem and see what can be done to solve it, including the introduction of new legislation.