Alsheich seems to be suffering from a case of someone who does not believe that the organization he leads should be allowed to survive without him.
By JPOST EDITORIALPolice commissioner Roni Alsheich salutes during a ceremony(photo credit: BAZ RATNER/REUTERS)
In the coming weeks, Roni Alsheich is supposed to step down as Israel’s police commissioner. The end of his tenure could not have come soon enough – and we would recommend that Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan consider having him step down even earlier.Alsheich seems to be suffering from a case of someone who does not believe that the organization he leads should be allowed to survive without him. He believes that only he can continue to lead the police and that if he is not allowed to – Erdan decided a few weeks ago not to grant him a fourth year – then the whole place will go down without him.We base this on the way Alsheich has behaved in the past few months. First, before the decision was made on his successor, Alsheich passed a document to Attorney-General Avichai Mandelblit in which he exposed damaging information about two out of three candidates who were in the running to become the next police chief.The document reportedly referred mostly to Jerusalem District Commander Yoram Halevy, who was rumored to be the top candidate but ultimately lost out to Moshe (Chico) Edri, the former head of the Tel Aviv District who was also mentioned in the document.Asked why he passed on such a vague document to Mandelblit, Alsheich claimed that he was fulfilling his civic duty. “I was obligated by law to pass on the information,” he was reported to have said at the time.This week again, Alsheich tried to scuttle the appointment. He appeared before the Goldberg Committee, which approves the appointment of top public officials, and presented them with rumors and stories that have never been confirmed about his declared successor Edri. One of Alsheich’s claims was that Edri did not undergo a now mandatory polygraph test for top police officers. But he didn’t have to because he had stepped down from the police force before the polygraph test was made mandatory, going on to serve as the director general of the Public Security Ministry.Edri has said that he is willing to undergo the test. But what made this claim even more bizarre was a report in Yediot Ahronot that Alsheich himself had not undergone a polygraph test. If that was true, why would he use the lie detector issue against his successor?We do not know what will happen with Edri’s appointment, but we hope for the sake of the country and the police that it goes through smoothly. Another failed appointment would be a fatal blow to the public’s already shaky trust in Israel’s police force.Alsheich, too, was appointed to the post when the first choice, former IDF officer Gal Hirsch, had to withdraw his candidacy after the police launched an investigation against him, now believed to have been a setup and intentional hit job meant to scuttle his appointment.Whatever happens, Alsheich will discover that his legacy will not be one of prominence and glory. Instead, he will be remembered for a tenure of police infighting not much different than many of his predecessors whose names the public has long forgotten.In 2015, when he was originally appointed to the top police post, Alsheich had just finished a term as the deputy head of the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency). Rumors at the time were that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had promised to make him the Shin Bet chief after a successful term at the helm of the police.But that is unlikely to happen. To his credit, Alsheich oversaw the police investigations against the prime minister and did not let alleged promises of promotions get in his way. Netanyahu, if he remains Israel’s prime minister after the next elections, will likely hold that against Alsheich when deciding on a new Shin Bet chief.When it came to the Netanyahu probes, Alsheich showed that he knows what his job is – to serve and protect Israel’s citizens and to eradicate corruption wherever it may be found in the government, even in the prime minister’s office.We hope that is what he is trying to do now as well. Because if he isn’t, he will be causing the police damage that will be difficult to repair.
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