The Interior Minister, Joan Ignasi Elena, and the mayor of Calella, Marc Buch, have ironed out the differences evident in recent weeks and after the Local Security Board this Thursday both have appeared together – it was not planned to be like this – to reaffirm the need to strengthen institutional cooperation between the Department and the City Council.
Elena has asked to put aside “sterile debates” to emphasize the search for solutions, while Buch demanded that the reinforcement of agents take place soon so as not to have to “raise our voice” again. However, the mayor admits that the joint operations of recent weeks have already borne fruit, with a drop in criminal acts this January: “We are on the path to a solution.”
An hour later than expected – the Local Security Board has been extended due to the participation of opposition political groups in the City Hall – Elena and Buch finally appeared together. The decision was made at the last minute, since initially the Interior had in mind that the minister would evaluate the meeting in a later appearance.
Although in the subsequent moments of the Board they have avoided informal contact, the presence of both on the same stage has served to make visible the change in relations between both administrations, after tense weeks of crossed accusations between the mayor and the councilor.
“It has gone well. We have talked about security from a global perspective,” the councilor began by saying, reaffirming his commitment to the residents of Calella. Elena also recalled, in an intervention with practically no police data, that security is not managed with “big statements or proclamations” and she asks to talk about it “overcoming confrontations.”
Elena has also refused to enter into the debate on the expulsion or non-expulsion of repeat offenders of foreign origin and affirms that security must be treated from the data of the criminal acts and not from the origin of the people who commit them. Nor has the mayor mentioned this controversy again.
Regarding solutions, the councilor explains that “each municipality is a world” and that it is the operatives who analyze the particularities of each one to put emphasis on those priority issues. In this sense, Elena insists, as she already said last week at the Maresme Regional Council, that multiple recidivism also has a legal and legislative dimension.
The mayor of Calella, Marc Buch, agrees with the diagnosis, calling for a decisive investment in the technical and human resources of the administration of justice and for the laws to be changed so that the fight against repeat offenders is truly effective, once that they are detained by the police.
Despite everything, Buch took advantage of his appearance to remember that it was necessary to “raise his voice” to capture the attention of the top officials of the Department of the Interior and hopes that after the commitments adopted this Thursday this will not have to happen again. “We have made a commitment to institutional cooperation,” she says.
In this sense, the mayor of Calella highlights that criminal acts have increased in the municipality by 21.7% in the last year, with an increase in thefts of 34% and violent acts of 7%. As a whole, crime data in Calella is 60% higher than the Catalan average and 86% higher than in Maresme as a whole.
However, the City Council admits that police collaboration is beginning to bear fruit, thanks to a special device that in recent weeks has made it possible to arrest eight of the eleven repeat offenders who were active in the municipality, all of them young people who had been released from custody. 18 years were left out of the social circuit. “We are on the path to a solution,” says the mayor.
Despite everything, Buch says that we still cannot let our guard down, even though crime incidents have already begun to decrease this January. The mayor demands more Mossos destined for Alt Maresme or that the deployment of special devices by the Catalan police be more common than until now.
