Too much of a coincidence
The death of two men as they were being arrested raises new questions about the Catalan regional police
In less than 24 hours, two people died as they were being detained by the Mossos d’Esquadra, the Catalan regional police force. The first death took place at Molina square in Barcelona. The Mossos were alerted to the fact that an individual was pestering patrons at a cafeteria. The police presence made the man even more agitated, and he was dealt with by six officers. Once in handcuffs, he fainted and died. The victim was notably agitated, but he was not armed.
The second death took place in Salou, Tarragona during the arrest of a man who had assaulted his partner. The woman was wounded and the man displayed a very aggressive attitude toward officers, which made it difficult to subdue him. After the Mossos managed to handcuff him, he also passed out and died.
The known facts are not enough to determine whether there was police abuse or not, but it is unusual and highly alarming to see the rate at which serious incidents, some of them fatal, keep occurring in operations carried out by this police force.
The last two deaths come exactly six months after a businessman named Juan Andrés Benítez died during a police raid in the Barcelona neighborhood of El Raval; 10 officers are being investigated for the incident, nine of whom could be charged with homicide.
The credibility of the Mossos’ political chief has been seriously compromised by the death in El Raval
This time around, the commissioner for internal affairs, Ramón Espadaler, tried to stay one step ahead and immediately ordered an internal investigation, unlike with the Raval case. Yet Espadaler has also stated that according to the information in his power, in both cases the police acted “within established procedures.”
The problem is that the credibility of the Mossos’ political chief was seriously compromised by his reaction to the businessman’s death. Police chiefs offered a version of events that turned out to be false, as a video later showed, and the police statement did not match the facts, either. Given these precedents, it is necessary to insist on an in-depth investigation into the recent events.
In any case, it seems obvious that something is not working properly in a law-enforcement agency that is facing so many court cases. Right now, six officers from El Vendrell are being investigated for injuring a detainee on December 31; eight more are under scrutiny for the death of a Moroccan man in the same police precinct in July; nine officers from Barcelona are also under investigation for beating and humiliating three youths following their arrest last summer.
And these are only the the latest cases. In every one, the officers alleged that the detainees were “highly agitated” and that they “acted within the protocols.”
It is surprising that incidents featuring people that, no matter how agitated, are not armed and do not represent a serious danger, end up causing a lot more harm — in some cases death — than the harm the police were trying to prevent. If officers acted according to the protocols, then it is evident that those procedures will need to be reviewed as well.
