That may sound like an extreme reaction, but Barcelona is indeed enduring an alarming spike in crime. Across the city, reported cases of crimes rose by 20.5 percent over 2018, with just over a quarter of the city’s residents becoming victims of a crime over the same period. Zoom in on the figures, however, and one area sails far ahead of the rest—the four tourist-filled neighborhoods that make up Barcelona’s Old City, called Ciutat Vella in Catalan. According to figures from the city, 36.6 percent of Ciutat Vella residents reported being victims of a crime over 2018, with the rate of robbery with violence or intimidation reported in August 2018 in the area having doubled year-on-year.
That figure should rightly sound alarming, but the idea of a Barcelonan crime wave needs to be put in perspective. Spain as a whole still has one of the lowest murder rates in the world—lower than Germany, or its neighbors France and Portugal—and Barcelona’s rates do not necessarily buck this trend. According to the Spanish publication La Vanguardia, by far the largest category of reported crimes in Barcelona’s Old City are thefts without violence, which in August 2017 constituted 74 percent of all recorded offenses; robberies with violence and intimidation constituted 5.7 percent.[...]
Ciutat Vella’s problems could also describe parts of any number of heavily touristed European cities, where similar tensions exist over crime, affluence, and visitor safety. But the situation here is being exacerbated by a uniquely Barcelonan twist. The city’s policing responsibilities are divided between a municipal department and one under the control of the autonomous community of Catalonia, which has lately been vying for independent statehood. The set-up is complex, politically fraught, and not entirely joined-up. Such is the cluster of responsible bodies that a crime committed in Barcelona can, during the process of investigation, end up involving several different police forces. [...]
Some feel the city’s government should also bear some responsibility for the problems. Under the leadership of Mayor Ada Colau (who still has a narrow majority approval rating), the Guardia Urbana have backpedaled a little on their previous function as agents of public order. Colau’s left-leaning political grouping, Barcelona en Comú, evolved in part from an anti-eviction activist network, and as a result may tend to be skeptical about any form of heavy-handed police deployment. Former police assistant director and current Catalan Green Party politician Jaume Bosch, one of the officials responsible for creating the Mossos D’Esquadra’s role in its present form, noted in a magazine interview that City Hall had “a somewhat hippy idea, according to which they understood that everything could be solved with social mechanisms, and that the police were not really their thing.”
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