First personal police brutality suit

Monday, March 20, 2017, 10:53 Over the past two years Honenu Attorneys have filed dozens of suits against policemen, a large proportion of them for police brutality. However only recently has Honenu filed a personal suit, for the first time, against a specific policeman and not against the Israeli Police.
The suit is for 30,000 NIS against a policeman serving with the Jerusalem Police. The suit, which was filed by Honenu Attorney Menashe Yado, states that the policeman falsely detained a youth, hit him at the police station, stripped him, humiliated him and also falsified police reports on the basis of which the court distanced him from the area of Jerusalem.
Honenu justifies the unusual decision to file the personal claim against the policeman by the fact that this is an incident in which in addition to the false detention claim by the youths, the severe police brutality and the humiliation at the police station, the policeman also prima facie breached trust by falsifying police reports on which the police based demands in court. Only after the courts were presented with video clips documenting the incident was the truth revealed.
The incident occurred approximately two years ago. A policeman demanded that several youths walking in the area of the Bar Ilan Intersection in Jerusalem present their ID cards. The plaintiff immediately identified himself, as is seen in the video clips documenting the incident which the youths filmed on their cell phones. However his friends demanded to see a police ID card. The policeman refused, which is illegal, and an argument ensued. The four youths were detained and taken to the police station. At the station the policeman demanded their cell phones in order to delete the documentation of the incident in which he violated regulations by not presenting his ID card.
According to the suit, when the cell phone was not found, the policeman declared, “Now you’ll see what the GSS is,” demanded that the plaintiff stand with his face to the wall for an extended time, and afterwards demanded that he strip. Then the policeman carried out a humiliating body search.
The following day the plaintiff was brought to the Jerusalem Magistrate Court and distanced from Jerusalem for 15 days on the basis of a falsified police report filed by the policeman. Honenu Attorneys filed an appeal on the decision and presented a video clip of the incident to the court, which caused the police representative to agree to cancel the distancing order after he understood that the video contradicted what the policeman had stated in the police report.
Honenu Attorney Menasheh Yado: “After we saw that neither the police nor the Police Investigation Unit knew how to deal with the policeman, we decided to file a personal suit against him. The incident was not a momentary loss of control, but rather a series of actions in violation of laws and regulations, in addition to the severely violent treatment and humiliation of the detainee. The policeman misled his commanders and the court with a falsified police report. There is no reason for the defense of a policeman such as this to be funded by tax-payers’ funds. I hope that the court will penalize him to the full extent of the law.”

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