Night Shift: Tel Aviv

An American Crime Reporter Goes on Patrol with the City’s Men in Blue

Flying down Ayalon Highway at 90 mph, we’re racing to a dead man’s home. We don’t yet know he’s dead. It’s 2 a.m. saturday, and I’m in an Israeli police patrol car with Captain Barak Ilan Anthony at the wheel.

The call said “minorities”—in Israel that usually means Arabs—have kidnapped a Jewish man from a beach south of Herzliya, a coastal city about 20 minutes from Tel Aviv. Officers in Herzliya have requested help, and Anthony, who runs Tel Aviv’s night shift, has sent three units, a quarter of his troops, to help in the search.

We wind through Ramat Aviv Gimel, a wealthy neighborhood of Tel Aviv, hoping that this a false alarm, that the man is safe in bed as most folks would be at this hour. The neighborhood’s clean, wide streets are lined with tall, nondescript apartment buildings. We find the one we are looking for, climb out of the car, cross a wide concrete plaza and take an elevator to the fourth floor, stopping at unit 16.

Anthony, 39, long-limbed and slim with jet-black hair and thick eyebrows, rings the bell while his partner, Ido Haber, a tall, pale 19-year-old whose prominent ears stick out from his short brown hair, knocks. The two officers repeat this pattern more than a dozen times, ring-knock-knock, ring-knock-knock, before they give up. They push the door to see if it gives and peer into the peephole to look for movement. Nothing. Anthony slips his card into the doorframe, and we head downstairs.

“We cannot know at this stage, but the informer sounds reliable,” Anthony says, noting that the police get about one kidnapping call a week. “Tel Aviv is one of the cities that suffers more from crime than other places like Jerusalem and Haifa,” he adds as we return to Tel Aviv. And peak crime time is Fridays and Saturdays from 1 to 4 a.m.

My night out with the police had begun a little past 9 p.m. when I arrived at Tel Aviv’s main police station at Dizengoff and Jabotinsky streets. Usually, I’m a crime reporter in California; Anthony had agreed to take me on patrol so I could see what life is like for cops in Israel’s liveliest city. At the front desk, I traded my passport for a clip-on badge and was sent to find Anthony on my own. I’ve been to many police stations, but this self-guided tour was a first. No locked security door beyond the desk, no official escort. I just walked up the stairs, turned two corners and entered Anthony’s office.

Anthony was at his desk in a small narrow room getting ready for a 9:30 briefing. As the shift supervisor, Anthony coordinates more than a dozen officers in central Tel Aviv. He had the harried demeanor of anyone about to make a presentation as he flipped through a heavy orange binder, then took off down the hall to a conference room.

Seated at the head of a long wooden table, Anthony addresses three women and more than a dozen men, all uniformed, wearing dark blue slacks and light-blue short-sleeve shirts. Unlike many of their big city counterparts in the U.S., no one wears body armor. Anthony goes over terrorism alerts and reminds his officers about a threatened attack from the sea that could include a suicide bombing. On the wall, I notice two plaques commemorating officers killed in 2002 terrorist attacks.

Mostly, the half-hour briefing is routine: There are car assignments and reminders to avoid force unless necessary. As they leave, the officers laugh and joke down the hallway. They remind me of a team filing out from the locker room on game night.

Before heading out, Haber checks the patrol car’s equipment: an M-16 rifle, roadblock flares, body bags and red-and-white crime scene tape. Haber isn’t a typical police recruit; that is, he didn’t sign up to be a cop. He is fulfilling his military service by working with the police: A shortage of officers requires some Israeli military troops to be siphoned into the police force.

“It’s nothing like I imagined before I came here,” he tells me. “I thought I would be ticketing cars.” He describes one memorable case, a nationwide chase for a terrorist suspect. “Each day is something new.”

The blue-and-white sedan we’re in is a typical patrol car, although, unlike in the U.S., there’s no security barrier between the front and the rear seats. And the back seats are comfortable and upholstered, not stripped down and made of hard plastic that can easily be scrubbed clean of bodily fluids. Haber points out a similarity, however, when he comes to my door to unhitch a mechanism that lets me get out without help. Usually, it’s locked to keep suspects in.

We head down Sderot Rothschild, a wide boulevard in central Tel Aviv. Split by a lush island that doubles as a popular park, the busy street is lined with cafes and restaurants. People are everywhere, strolling in the warm air, talking side by side on benches, eating ice cream at sidewalk stalls. Anthony explains that his car’s blue rooftop lights flash pretty much anytime we’re moving. When Washington, DC, police visited Israel to study enforcement techniques after 9/11 they brought home this idea, designed to make police presence more noticeable.

Anthony and Haber look for anything suspicious, including stolen cars. They constantly check license plate numbers, typing them into an in-car computer to find violators. “We’re going to check at least 100 plates tonight,” Anthony says over the squawk of the police scanner as Haber keys in numbers from the passenger seat.

Sure enough, Anthony flips on his siren and speeds up behind a silver Ford van on Allenby Street. According to the computer, there is a warrant out for the van’s owner. When the van doesn’t slow, Anthony pulls alongside it, and Haber shouts at the driver to pull over. This strikes me as a dangerous move—what if the driver shoots at us or tries to ram us?—but he just frowns and speeds away.

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Emilie Raguso is a reporter in Oakland, CA. Her work has been featured on The New York Times website, Salon, NPR and in a range of California publications.