The Ministry of the Interior and the Barcelona City Council will hold a meeting on Thursday to try to redirect the serious institutional crisis open between the two organizations, and of which La Vanguardia gave details in its edition yesterday. The event will be attended by the director of the Mossos d’Esquadra, Pere Ferrer, and the number two of the police, the police station Rosa Bosch, on the one hand, and the Security manager, Maite Casado, and the mayor and chief of the Urban Guard, Pedro Velázquez, on the other. The will of both 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 operatives carry out daily on the street.
This month, the Mossos leadership transferred to the Urban Police the dissolution of the joint public health investigation teams that in recent years had been operating in the city with a result of more than 400 points of sale closed. The argument put forward was the need to “recover and organize” powers lost in recent years in matters of investigation and avoid future legal conflicts, since the urban guards appeared in many reports as secretaries of proceedings, lacking powers in investigation.
The announcement became the last straw that almost overflowed in November, in a meeting at the Interior headquarters in which both delegations exchanged harsh reproaches. At that meeting, which was called to present the security device of the Sailing America’s Cup to Mayor Jaume Collboni, the element from which the crisis began came to light and which is none other than the commitment of the Urban Police. and the City Council in sexist violence.
The information from La Vanguardia yesterday caused a multitude of messages exchanged between its protagonists. The Deputy Mayor for Security, Albert Batlle, promised to continue working for police coordination, without giving up either public health research or the prevention of sexist violence. In the Interior, when asked by this newspaper, they declined to make statements. The Catalan Ombudsman of Barcelona, ??David Bondia, wrote a statement last night showing his concern about the crisis revealed by this newspaper.