Seven Palestinian policemen headed home this week, after completing a three- month training program with the Philadelphia Police Department.
“It was a very important experience to take back,” said Sammeh Kannan, who headed the delegation.
Kannan, who spoke in a telephone interview from Philadelphia, said he would help organize the Palestinian Authority’s new police academy in Jericho.
The Philadelphia course placed heavy emphasis on community policing and nonviolence, with visits to the civil review board and community groups, he said.
“They were very impressed from the fact that the police were not the supermen, that they have rules and regulations,” said Marwan Kreidie, a leader of Philadelphia’s Arab American community.
“A lot of them say the word democracy, but they don’t know the concept. I think they were very impressed by the seriousness with which it’s taken here,” said Kreidie, who was instrumental in bringing over the trainees.
When they first arrived, the younger policemen would just take orders.
By the end, “the captain said to me, `They’re questioning everything,'” said Kreidie.
Kreidie and other local Arab American leaders approached City Hall about inviting the Palestinians at the beginning of the year, after reading about a similar delegation from South Africa.
The police department had previously hosted delegations from Japan, Great Britain and Sweden, said James Golden, executive officer of the Philadelphia Police Department.
During the training program, the visiting officers joined Philadelphia’s police as they went on patrol. They also visited crime scenes, watched investigations and saw how the civil affairs unit handled demonstrations.
Some officers focused on specialty areas such as dignitary protection, stakeout activities and criminal investigations, Golden said.
How to handle demonstrations was particularly sensitive for the Palestinians, most of whom “were part of the struggle against [the Israeli] occupation for a long time,” said Kannan.
Kannan had previously served with the Palestinian delegation to the bilateral peace talks in Washington prior to the Oslo Accords, which paved the way for an Israeli-Palestinian accord in 1993.
“Here, they have law, they have freedom of expression, they deal with demonstrations in a democratic way,” Kannan said.
“This is a very important experience, to give people freedom of expression. If they don’t have freedom of expression in a peaceful means, they will go to other means to express themselves,” he said.
During their stay, the police officers also met with members of the Jewish community. “We had some delicious dinners together,” Kannan said. “We met and discussed the situation.
“They were very supportive of us,” he added.
According to Rabbi David Wortman, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Philadelphia, “Some elements in the Jewish community were very much opposed” to the Palestinians being here.
“They felt that since most of them are `graduates’ of Israeli prisons, they’re all terrorists and training them is only training them to kill Jews,” he said.
But other elements of the community were supportive and “felt it was a positive step for creating better understanding and professionalism within the Palestinian police,” Wortman said.
Most of Philadelphia’s Jews, Wortman said, were either silent or figured that if the training increased the ability of the Palestinian Authority to control terrorism from within — which was not necessarily a sure thing — it was a good thing.
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