Antonio Fernández. Barcelona
05/07/2019 13:41
The Mossos d’Esquadra cannot guarantee security in Catalonia. Bad planning, lack of resources and bureaucracy are circumstances that weigh down the Police in charge of citizen security in this community, to the point that the Sindicat de Policies de Catalunya (SPC) sent a letter on Wednesday to the Director General of the Police, Andreu Martinez, expressing the desperate situation in which the Police is.
The letter, which El Confidencial has had access to and which bears the entry stamp of this Thursday, is signed by the general secretary of the union, David José Mañas, and highlights the deficiencies of the police institution, while making blush those in charge of the Ministry of the Interior for the deplorable situation in which the citizen’s security of the community is found.
“We want to show that there are villages and cities in Catalonia with thousands of citizens living in them and where the levels of robberies with force in commercial establishments have increased by more than 45%, where thefts with force inside the home have increased in more than 52% and where robberies have increased by more than 52%”, says the letter.
The text also highlights serious events such as “the death of people who have chosen Catalonia as a place to enjoy their vacations”. It refers to the violent death of Hyewon Kim, Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism of South Korea, who died after a strong pull in the old town of the Catalan capital. But that’s not all: “Continuous sexual assaults, confrontations with firearms, fights between gangs and an endless list of criminal acts on the rise. A reality with no make-up; it is what it is, and especially the citizens suffer it, but also the agents of the Mossos d’Esquadra for the job insecurity and the overexertion to be made by this lack of member in the Police”.
They cannot guarantee safety
The SPC indicates to the general director that the police work is harmed day after day “mainly by the lack of members, where a few agents of the body are relegated to realize tasks of security in static points, as it is the case of the service TOGA, where also these few troops are drowned in the unnamable world of bureaucratic processing (collection of complaints in the offices of attention to the citizen, quick trials, judicial requirements, etc.), a generalized situation throughout the territory that leaves much time for patrolling police security and that makes it difficult to perform a series of preventive and efficient services, to ensure the safety of our citizens”.
The SPC indicates to the general director that the police work is harmed day after day “mainly by the lack of members”
In other words, what the letter is saying is that citizen security is diminished due to the small number of agents and the bureaucratic work that many of them have to perform, which does not allow them to patrol the streets and prevent crimes that cause citizen alarm.
“We want to make public a fact that we believe seriously harms the task that society as a whole and the rules of the rule of law have entrusted to us and that is to ensure public safety”, they warn to the top political officer of the Police.
The union stresses that with the letter “they do not want to ask for anything”. “At the moment, only making clear a real situation of lack of security manifested in many of our cities and villages, motivated by the serious shortage of members that suffers the Police”.
They remind Andreu Martínez that a fundamental right of citizenship is to enjoy “a public and efficient security, but that currently, with this lack of resources and a planning of thousands of hours of static and bureaucratic services, they cannot guarantee with effectiveness a security that all the committed members of the Mossos d’Esquadra would like to be able to give”.
The letter ends by pointing out to the high officer of the Ministry of the Interior: “We hope that this situation of insecurity that you want to have hidden reaches those responsible for ensuring citizen security in Catalonia and efficiently implement measures to ensure the safety of cities and the work efficiency for the agents of the Mossos d’Esquadra”.
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