The Ministry of the Interior and the Barcelona City Council will hold a meeting on Thursday to try to resolve the serious institutional crisis between the two bodies, and of which La Vanguardia gave details in its Monday edition. At the meeting there will be the presence of the director of the Mossos d’Esquadra, Pere Ferrer, and the number two of the police, commissioner Rosa Bosch, on the one hand, and the manager of Security, Maite Casado, and the major intendant and head of the Urban Guard, Pedro Velázquez, on the other. The will of the two parties is to try to “redirect” the current situation of lack of institutional coordination, which for the moment has not affected the work that the agents carry out on a daily basis in the streets.
This month the direction of the Mossos transferred to the Urban Guard the dissolution of the joint teams of investigation in matters of public health that have been operating in the city in recent years with a result of more than 400 points of sale closed. The argument put forward was the need to “recover and order” competences lost in recent years in matters of investigation and avoid future legal conflicts, since the urban guards appeared in many attestations as secretaries of the diligences, despite not having research skills.
The announcement became the straw that spilled a glass that was already about to spill in November, in a meeting at the headquarters of the Interior in which the two groups hurled harsh reproaches at each other. In that meeting, which was convened to present to Mayor Jaume Collboni the security device for the America’s Sailing Cup, the element from which the crisis began emerged and which is no other than the commitment of the Urban Guard and the City Council in sexist violence.
The information from La Vanguardia caused a multitude of crossed messages between its protagonists yesterday. The deputy mayor for Security, Albert Batlle, pledged to continue working for police coordination, without giving up on public health research or the prevention of gender-based violence. The Interior, responding to this newspaper, refused to make statements. For his part, the Ombudsman of Barcelona, ??David Bondia, wrote a statement last night in which he shows his concern following the crisis revealed by this newspaper.
