Mossos d’Esquadra in the spotlight

Pres­i­dent Quim Torra and in­te­rior min­is­ter Miquel Buch are to hold an emer­gency meet­ing on Sun­day to tackle the fall­out from the heavy-handed tac­tics used by the Cata­lan po­lice, the Mossos d’Es­quadra, against anti-fas­cist pro­test­ers at po­lit­i­cal ral­lies in Girona and Ter­rassa on Thurs­day, which ended with 42 mem­bers of the pub­lic and 12 of­fi­cers in­jured in Girona alone.

The far-left CUP party again called for the res­ig­na­tions of Buch and po­lice com­man­ders yes­ter­day, after one of its MPs, Maria Sir­vent, was wounded in the hand by a rub­ber bul­let while help­ing a fallen child in Ter­rassa. The left-wing ERC and Catalunya en Comú-Podem par­ties also called for ex­pla­na­tions of the Mossos’ con­duct, while the union­ist PSC and Cs par­ties showed sup­port for the po­lice. Mean­while, po­lice unions called for the force to be “de­politi­cised” and pointed out that while Buch spoke about tak­ing ac­tion against of­fi­cers, the head of the Mossos, An­dreu Martínez, de­scribed the ac­tions of the riot po­lice of­fi­cers as “pro­por­tional”, for warn­ing the crowds be­fore they charged them.

Yes­ter­day began with a blunt mes­sage from Torra in the morn­ing, giv­ing Buch four days to bring order to the Cata­lan po­lice, al­though things calmed down in the af­ter­noon with the an­nounce­ment of Sun­day’s meet­ing. In a state­ment from Slove­nia, Torra an­nounced that he had agreed with the min­is­ter to meet “to see if any bad prac­tice had taken place” and “to make any nec­es­sary changes to the pro­to­cols for ac­tion”, al­though he ruled out mak­ing any changes to per­son­nel in the in­te­rior de­part­ment.

In media in­ter­views yes­ter­day morn­ing, Buch ad­mit­ted the pos­si­bil­ity that some of­fi­cers may have gone too far in deal­ing with the pro­test­ers against the ral­lies or­gan­ised by the far-right Vox party, and he an­nounced an in­ter­nal in­ves­ti­ga­tion be­cause “some of the im­ages seen do not fit with the model of a de­mo­c­ra­tic po­lice force.”