The Minister of the Interior, Joan Ignasi Elena, and the head of the Cabinet for Security and Transversal Policies, Alba Alfageme, presented yesterday the latest edition of the Public Security Survey of Catalonia. A study that goes beyond the objective statistics of complaints and that helps to better understand the perception that Catalans have about security. A study in which the respondents also rate the Mossos d’Esquadra and the local police and which shows how the income level of the interviewee conditions their assessment of security.
The survey reveals that 33% of the people interviewed stopped doing things for fear of being victims of a crime. A percentage that rises to 45% in the case of women. A harsh reality that conditions the day-to-day life of many women who avoid itineraries at night that they do during the day; or who try not to return home alone after leaving a leisure space for fear of what might happen to them.
An uncertainty that conditions the freedom of the respondents and that forces, in Elena’s words, to maintain the impulse of the “feminization” of her department’s policies beyond the increase in the presence of women in the police.
The demographic study, on the responses of 7,995 citizens of Catalonia consulted between February and March of this year about events in 2022, detects a reduction in the level of perception of security compared to the last edition. This perception goes from 6.8 out of 10 in 2020, to 6.6 in 2022, but is well below 2017, when it was 7.2. 32.4% of those surveyed claimed to have been victims of a crime, a percentage that drops to 25.8% when any fraud is excluded from the statistics, a crime modality that is on the rise and which, according to the advisor, distorts the outcome of the survey’s findings. In another section, Catalans rate the safety of their municipalities with a score of 6.6, the lowest since 2013.
60.1% of the respondents claimed to have suffered a crime related to people (abuse, aggression), although in the next specific question that dealt with threats and intimidation.
The Mossos d’Esquadra continue to receive a good score, 7.5 on a scale of 0 to 10 (the second best in their history, after that of 2017), and are particularly well rated by the population over 65 years, which gives them an 8.1, compared to the 7 they receive from young people between 16 and 25 years old. Local police officers remain at a 7 (7.6 among those older than 65 and 6.9 in the group between 16 and 25).
Despite these good scores, citizens, when they are victims, choose not to report. Because? They were given several options and 50.4% said that there was little that could be done, others that it was too complicated, 32% said that they had little confidence in justice, and 23% that they did not they trusted the police. 10% said they would not report “out of fear”.
