Violence in the northern mixed city of Acre is continuing Friday, with reports of a near gun battle between an Arab resident of the city and police, who are out in force to calm the situation.

Here are a few interesting statistics about Acre:

According to statistics on the website of the Acre municipality, the average income of residents of the city is 16 percent less than the national average.

According to the Acre website, an average wage for an Acre resident is NIS 4,533. But according to the Central Bureau of Statistics, the national average is somewhere around the NIS 8,100 mark; meaning an almost 50% difference, much larger than the municipality’s stated 16%.

This means a lot of working poor, and all the social ills that come with that. Furthermore, it’s just been reported that the city’s arts festival, which was supposed to kick off next week, has been canceled. The festival usually attracts tens of thousands of Israelis to the city, who then replenish the empty coffers of the stall owners, restaurants and other shops in this city. The cancellation will have a negative effect on the city’s economy, and could exacerbate the security situation even more.

Furthermore, only 18% of the city’s households have post-high school education. I’ve never heard of anyone really famous or influential coming out of Acre.

Acre has 52, 657 residents. Of those, 28% are Arabs. Twenty five percent of the city’s residents are immigrants from the former Soviet Union.

A button on the municipality’s site which links to the city’s “city without violence” project leads to a page that currently reads: “Under construction”.

Wednesday’s violence erupted after an Arab motorist entered a predominantly Jewish neighborhood on the holiest of Jewish days.

The incident quickly developed into a mass riot involving hundreds of people, during which dozens of cars and some 30 shops were vandalized. Three people, including the Arab motorist and a police officer, sustained light injuries. The clashes between Arabs and Jews resumed Thursday evening, after Yom Kippur ended, as hundreds of Jews and Arabs demonstrated and confronted police near the train station in eastern Acre and near the city’s northern housing projects.

Northern District Police chief Shimon Koren said on Friday night that so far 22 people have been arrested for disturbing the peace, and that more arrests were forthcoming. Koren said something else interesting: that police will go after the Islamic preachers, who over the muezzin, incited the Arab residents of Acre’s Old City to “go out with weapons towards the Jews”. Koren said police had intelligence about the muezzins [that call on the faithful to prayer] and would “deal with them”. It will be interesting to see what happens in this regard, as bringing in these Muslim holy men for questioning is going to be tricky, to say the least; but these people need to be confronted for this sort of thing to be solved.