:Abstract
- The scope of crime in Israel is similar to that in other OECD countries. Since the middle of the 1990s, Israel’s relative position has remained essentially unchanged. However, the sense of personal security in Israel is markedly lower.
- The crime rate—the number of crimes (known to law enforcement) per 1,000 residents—in Moslem localities is much lower than the rate in Jewish ones (30 vs. 50). The opposite is true with regard to crimes against a person’s body. A similar picture is conveyed when estimating the probability of an Arab to be a crime victim, based on the Social Survey conducted by the Central Bureau of Statistics.
- In the past decade, the crime rate has declined markedly, but only slightly in Arab localities.
- The ratio between the number of crimes reported to the police hotline and the number of crimes known to the police and carried out in Arab localities is lower by about half than the ratio in Jewish localities. This is true as well of the probability that an Arab victim of a crime will report it to the police.
- The arrest rate among Moslem males is more than double its rate among Jewish males The gap is even greater among youth (80 per 1,000 people aged 20–24 compared with 20 per 1,000). In the 1990s, there was a decline in the arrest rate for all population groups, though in the previous decade the decline moderated and even halted.
- The rate of convicted persons among Arab males is much greater than the rate among Jewish males—more than 10 per 1,000 compared with less than 6 per 1,000 at the end of the previous decade. In the past two decades, there was a marked decline in the rate, for both Arabs and Jews.
- The probability that an Arab will have a sense of personal security is lower, by about a quarter, than the probability that a Jew will have that sense, other personal characteristics kept equal. Arabs’ sense of personal security has weakened over the course of the past decade.
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