In the end, the game board on which criminals and police compete is such a defined space that it is only in this way that it is understood that someone is able to recognize the face of a young man among a thousand who has been seen in a frame from a security camera. . That capacity is like a muscle that is trained based on many hours kicking the streets, paying attention to details that go unnoticed by other mortals.
Much of this has the success of the Mossos d’Esquadra’s regional Titani investigation group. A handful of policemen who were accompanied on the street this week by two journalists from La Vanguardia. The objective of the operation was to locate in Ciutat Vella one of the twenty people already identified and those who are related to the theft of watches.
We explained it in these same pages last week. The Titani group was created last year after the runaway increase in violent robberies of luxury watches in Barcelona. As it is such a specific subject, these police officers work on each robbery collecting the maximum burden of proof against the possible perpetrators.
A burden of proof that in this type of robbery is mainly the images of the moment of the robbery or of the previous moments, which almost always exist in a city that is increasingly familiar with video surveillance.
The sergeant in charge of the group carries a folder with the twenty arrest sheets that correspond to each of the objectives. They are men, practically all of them with a criminal record, foreigners, who previously in the office of the Sant Martí police station, Titani headquarters, have been linked to the violent theft of a watch.
On the street, on an electric scooter, bicycle or moped, divided into three groups and connected by the same radio station, the search begins, which that afternoon focuses on Barceloneta and the Forat de la Vergonya, in the Ribera neighborhood.
The entourage leaves the police station at six in the afternoon and in half an hour, one of the three corporals reports on the station that a suspect has been arrested. Amine attends to the instructions of the mosso and puts on an incredulous face when she assures him that he is under arrest accused of the violent robbery of a 2,500-euro watch that was stolen not far away, on Via Laietana, on July 3. The man warns them that they are targeting the wrong thing and during the search a phone is located with a photograph on the home screen of an older man who looks like a Nordic. The investigators request the presence of a patrol to transfer the detainee to Les Corts and that is when one of the dramas of Barcelona begins. The arrival of the vehicle takes more than an hour, during which time the arrested man remains handcuffed, facing the wall, in a square between the busy Assaonadors and Tantarantana streets.
Any incident that occurs that afternoon in Barcelona related to the theft of a watch will be reported to the sergeant. The policemen come across some suspects whom they observe closely following a young woman with a suggestive watch. They stick together without being seen, strolling through the Gòtic, until at the doors of the Shunka restaurant, on Sagristans street, the thieves change their target and focus on a tourist with a large suitcase and a backpack who is distracted until she is they snatch the laptop bag. The woman begins to scream, and the arrest is immediate. At ten o’clock at night, in the surroundings of the Rambla del Raval, two members of the Ciutat Vella fura identify one of the suspects that the Titani group is looking for accused of stealing a watch worth 16,000 euros, on June 30 on Flassaders Street. Yamid is 19 years old and assures that that day he was with an educator, then he hesitates and laments in Arabic. He has no criminal record, and one of his friends unsuccessfully tries to get the mossos to let him take a tortilla sandwich with him to jail.
