There is hardly a single public telephone of the 4000 or so situated in streets and other public places that has not been vandalized, according to senior officials at the Communications Ministry. Receivers are ripped out coin boxes are smashed open and looted and the booths themselves are wrecked. In many cases, after repeated attacks, the Ministry is forced to remove the facility permanently, putting up a office in its place to the effect that the removal was caused by repeated acts of hooliganism, the officials said.
According to the officials, the Ministry lost some IL 8 million annually as a result of phone vandalism. They said that the task of preventing these acts is too vast for police to handle. It was, one official claimed, part of a much brooder issue of the ugly Israeli. He challenged schools to teach “civility” to the younger generation. Meanwhile, the Ministry has ordered ostensibly vandal proof phones installed on the streets and public places.
The officials said the Ministry had recently set up a team of security men to stake out locations of off-wrecked phone booths and apprehend vandals in the act. But the vandals, when cornered, have beaten up the security men and fled from the scene. The officials have called on the courts to impose much stiffer sentences than before on offenders in order to create a credible deterrent.
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