Bill Bratton, the New York City Police Commissioner whose radical policies in the 1990s under Mayor Rudy Giuliani are credited with making the streets of New York City safer, urged Israeli police chiefs on Tuesday to stamp out as "terrorism" the anti-Arab hate crimes known as price tag attacks.

The commissioner was in Israel participating in the Public Security Ministry's Violence Prevention Week.

“I’ve discussed these 'price tag' attacks with Israeli police officials in the past few days and I know the debate here is, Do you treat it as terrorism or do you treat it as vandalism?” Bratton told Haaretz.

“It is a form of terrorism. It is all about creating hate,” Bratton said.

“It’s an issue that in America we have dealt with for many years successfully. One of the ways you deal with it is make it quite clear that type of crime is a crime that will not be tolerated,” he said. “It’s not something that can be ignored. If a swastika is painted on a door anywhere in America, that is treated very seriously. You’ve got to deal with it before it’s allowed to grow."

He said the Israeli approach to price tag attacks should be the same as the approach that he used to rid New York of a crime wave that by 1993 accounted for more than 2,000 murders every year. That number has fallen to a record low of less than 350.

“The idea is, you deal with the small things, you prevent them from developing into big things,” he said. “For example, by going after these price tag incidents very quickly and aggressively before they are allowed to grow – because if they get away with it then they’ll feel emboldened to do more."

Bratton, 66, served as NYPD Commissioner from 1994-96. He was re-appointed earlier this year by Mayor Bill de Blasio. He also headed the police departments in Los Angeles and Boston.

Bratton told police and security chiefs at the Ministry of Public Security’s National Conference on Personal Security in Jerusalem on Tuesday that his success in dealing with crime in New York in the 1990s was based on a philosophy known as the broken windows theory – the idea that the police should not focus just on major crimes but on the minor incidents that affect people’s daily lives and destroy a community’s quality of life.

“All those minor crimes if left unaddressed become more serious. All those more serious crimes if not addressed effectively spawn even more crime,” he warned.

Bratton said police should measure their success by how much crime they prevent, not by how quickly they respond after the event.

The NYPD commissioner said even a country as large and disparate as the United States could learn from the Israeli experience, because the core of Israel’s policy towards terrorism is prevention.

“The importance of dealing with terrorism is to prevent it,” he told Israeli police chiefs. “Community policing is all about the prevention of crime.”

“Officials here are constantly trying to prevent crime in much the same way they’ve been very successful over the year in preventing terrorism. A lot of the same systems can be used for both,” he said.

Bratton said that since 9/11, the NYPD had deployed its own full-time liaison officers in Tel Aviv, London, Madrid, Singapore, Amman and Abu Dhabi to secure real-time information about counter-terrorist tactics and apply the lessons in New York.

“With New York remaining the most singular terrorist target in the United States, if not the world, there was a need to develop capabilities beyond our normal liaison with the FBI to ensure that we had additional intelligence and information-gathering capabilities,” he said.

But Bratton was under no illusions that problems still remain in the United States. He told Tuesday’s conference of his frustration at the continued spread of weapons on the streets of America.

“There is a particular illness that afflicts my country, and that’s guns,” he said. “There are now in America more guns than there are people. We love guns and that is our misfortune. Guns create so much violence in my country."

Open gallery view A price tag attack in Beit Hanina, northeast Jerusalem. June 24, 2013. Credit: Olivier Fitoussi