Police restructure shelved

Cata­lan In­te­rior Min­is­ter Miquel Buch met with Mossos d’Es­quadra com­man­ders yes­ter­day. He promised that no changes would be made to the struc­ture of the po­lice force, de­spite the ul­ti­ma­tum is­sued by Pres­i­dent Quim Torra in the wake of po­lice charges against anti-fas­cist groups try­ing to boy­cott Vox acts in Girona and Ter­rassa on De­cem­ber 6. Buch agreed with the com­mand­ing of­fi­cers about the need to get the force out of the po­lit­i­cal spot­light and said that he could then see that the po­lice de­ploy­ment and pres­ence had been cor­rect after all.

Buch’s meet­ing yes­ter­day with Cata­lan po­lice com­man­ders was held at the Mossos head­quar­ters in Egara (Sabadell). At the meet­ing, ac­cord­ing to sev­eral sources, Buch must have taken some re­spon­si­bil­ity for the po­lit­i­cal cri­sis that emerged with Torra’s com­plaints about the po­lice charges on the day com­mem­o­rat­ing the Span­ish con­sti­tu­tion.

At the meet­ing Buch demon­strated his trust in po­lice work and said that after a more in-depth analy­sis, he could see that the forces in­volved in po­lice charges in Girona and Ter­rassa were, on the whole, in the right, ac­cord­ing to po­lice sources. Buch did not bring to the table any changes to the struc­ture of the Mossos d’Es­quadra, which means there will be none for now, de­spite Torra’s ul­ti­ma­tum. The min­is­ter merely com­mented that any fu­ture change would be an in­ter­nal de­ci­sion and must re­spond to struc­tural needs based on pro­fes­sional and ob­jec­tive cri­te­ria.

Buch also reached an agree­ment on in­creas­ing the force’s ef­forts to be “con­sis­tent in im­prov­ing and en­hanc­ing me­di­a­tion mech­a­nisms in all con­flicts”.