The municipality of Olot currently has some sixty occupied houses that generate problems of coexistence with the neighbors. According to the mayor, Pep Berga, this is one of the main concerns of the municipality. Berga has highlighted that in the capital of La Garrotxa there are close to a hundred more occupied flats, but they are “people without resources” and with whom the Local Police “is not particularly incisive”.
The data have been presented during the Local Security Board of Olot, in which the Minister of the Interior, Joan Ignasi Elena, has also participated, who has claimed a regulatory change at the state level to reduce “the uncertainty” that police cases have in actions related to conflicting occupations.
The municipality of Olot has registered 50 crimes per 1,000 inhabitants in 2022, 28 points below the Catalan average. Elena has remarked that “Olot is a safe city”, based on the indicators, despite the fact that people may sometimes have the wrong perception.
One of the main problems that have been put on the table in this meeting is that of illegal occupations. The Local Police has evidence of 156 illegally occupied homes. A hundred of these occupations are cases of people “who do not have resources.” The remaining sixty of this total are “uncivilized occupations”. These are cases that cause discomfort among the neighbors because people “play loud music, have parties or even traffic in narcotic substances,” explains Berga.
In this sense, the mayor has assured that the police try to be more incisive when it comes to throwing them out, but there is a lack of legal tools to act. The Minister of the Interior has expressed the need to change state regulations to put an end to “the uncertainty” that exists among the security forces when it comes to acting in the occupations.
In addition, Elena believes that the legislation also has to act with the “big landowners” who denounce illegal occupations despite the fact that they know that they generate conflicts. “It cannot be that nothing happens to them,” the counselor insisted.
Another worrying fact in Olot is the multiple recidivism. Despite the fact that Berga has lamented that neither the City Council nor the Generalitat have the power to act against it, it is necessary to put pressure on the state government to put an end to multiple recidivism.
The mayor assures that 25 people have accumulated 70 arrests in all of 2022. This is due to the fact that once detained, they go to court and are released. “This situation generates a lot of frustration”, pointed out the mayor of Olot. In fact, he assures that in these 25 cases “we know the first and last name” of the people, but the police have no more room for maneuver than arrest and “wait” for justice to determine the imprisonment.
The counselor Elena has taken advantage of the visit to the capital of La Garrotxa to announce that the Mossos d’Esquadra corps in the region has increased its staff by “10%” with the incorporation of 6 new agents. This figure could increase in the future with the new mossos promotions. Elena has chaired the Olot Local Security Board, which since 2018 was not the Interior Minister at the head of this annual meeting.
