During the days of president Lluís Companys, the Mossos d’Esquadra had a gypsy leader. His name was Felix Gavari Hortet, with an Aragonese father and a Catalan mother, and he died on February 18, 1953 in the infirmary of the Modelo prison, where he was serving a 20-year sentence for creating, together with a group of soldiers, the association of the armed forces. of the Republic.
The Major of the Mossos d’Esquadra, Josep Lluís Trapero, ended his conference yesterday with this unfairly unknown historical reference. The police officer was invited to give a presentation in the cycle “Dialogues for interculturality”, organized by the Gitano Secretariat and the La Caixa Foundation, at the Palau Macaya.
Trapero accepted the not easy challenge of talking about “democratic police and diversity” to a public that is too accustomed to being pointed out as “different.” The older man had already warned that, since he spoke little since he was laid off, the talk had been carefully prepared and that it would not be brief. And he wasn’t.
He admitted to being nervous because it is not easy to go on stage and speak from an institution, the police, and in his case the Mossos d’Esquadra, over which suspicions of racism or discrimination have always hovered, and today too.
The major got into the matter and admitted, after making a first defense of difference as the essence of diversity and wealth, that the police still have a long way to go. Because only by being a diverse police force will it be able to establish a face-to-face dialogue with the diverse and plural society it protects.
Those who know Trapero know of his critical sense, his uncomfortable positions and how he moves away from comfortable spaces to generate debate. Hence, he criticized how the Police worry too much about defending material goods and invest little in protecting the public, the landscapes, the air we breathe, the working conditions of workers or the repression of discrimination or racism. He called for a “more social” police force, but not with lip service, but rather one that seeks “collective well-being” and guarantees the rights of people, “getting involved in the safeguarding of civility.” A police force, he said, that enters the schools and neighborhoods as another agent.
Trapero defended the urgency of incorporating diversity in the Police, as a concept and as a reality. The figures are food for thought. Today, only one in every 137 mossos is a foreigner born outside of Europe. There are only four mossos in black Africa. And he recalled that if the Ministry of Defense once successfully opened the doors to other nationalities, it is only a matter of will to do so also in the Police to look for talent and the diversity necessary to achieve a “more social and democratic” police force.
