A leading candidate to be the next police chief boasted that protesters didn’t block roads in his district, adding that when such attempts were made he handled them “with a heavy hand.”
“Brutality is brutality,” Yoram Sofer, commander of the Coastal Police District, told N12 on Sunday. “Whoever attacks police officers attacks the State of Israel, not me personally. Therefore, if they need to be arrested, they need to be arrested; if they need to be dispersed, they’ll be dispersed. If they can be spoken with and that’s enough, then that’s enough.”
In the past week, media outlets reported that National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir does not intend to extend the tenure of Israel Police chief Kobi Shabtai and that he intends to announce this decision within the coming week.
Sofer has been the center of controversy in recent weeks as a number of incidents of alleged police brutality were reported against protesters in Caesarea and Hadera, which are under his jurisdiction.
Addressing the judicial reform protests, Sofer asked: “Why do we need to allow the same harm to the public for eight months?
“If you want to do something against democracy, there are elections. I am not the tool,” added Sofer. “You need to trust that I’ll do my job, in every place, with integrity, without considering all these things in the background.”
'Ben-Gvir's never told me to do something'
When asked if he would be willing to tell the national security minister “no,” Sofer responded: “What do you mean? Why do I need to tell him ‘no’? You need to understand more or less what the minister’s intentions are. Until today I have not seen the minister tell me once, ‘do something.’”