“Most people have accepted the rules”

Car­les San­tacreu has been head of the local po­lice in Pineda de Mar for twelve and a half years, and has more than 34 years of ex­pe­ri­ence in the po­lice force in dif­fer­ent towns. He states that from the per­spec­tive of his job, in the ser­vice of the pub­lic, the most dif­fi­cult thing has been adapt­ing to the de­mands of the pan­demic that are not strictly polic­ing is­sues.

“We’re talk­ing about areas that were not ours but that have been left to us, such as ask­ing peo­ple to put on masks, not to gather in groups, not to break the cur­few. In ad­di­tion, we usu­ally work with long-term rules but with the pan­demic, the or­ders that come down change every day,” he points out.

San­tacreu re­calls that in the past six months he has com­piled a very large index of or­ders – about 120 doc­u­ments in all – that he shared daily with his of­fi­cers: “We had to adapt, be­cause there was no other way to han­dle it.”

Ac­cord­ing to the Pineda chief in­spec­tor, “the vast ma­jor­ity of the pub­lic have ac­cepted the rules, no mat­ter how change­able they may be.” “Re­spon­si­ble and civic-minded peo­ple tend to do that in any sit­u­a­tion, but the per­cent­age of less civil and anti-sys­tem peo­ple fol­low­ing the rules has also re­mained more or less sta­ble dur­ing the Covid-19 cri­sis,” he says, adding that there have not been more in­frac­tions than nor­mal in the mu­nic­i­pal­ity since the pan­demic began. How­ever, he ac­knowl­edges that there are three im­po­si­tions that peo­ple have gen­er­ally found harder to com­ply with. “Wear­ing a mask prop­erly and avoid­ing groups and what we are call­ing ’in­vis­i­ble ter­races’, which are the gath­er­ings of peo­ple around the bars when they go to get a take­away cof­fee,” he says, adding that this is the re­sult of “peo­ple here being un­ac­cus­tomed to the Anglo-Saxon take­away cul­ture.”

Ac­cord­ing to the po­lice in­spec­tor, the sto­ries about peo­ple com­ing up with a thou­sand and one imag­i­na­tive ways of by­pass­ing the lock­down rules in March is mostly an urban leg­end. “It’s true you would come across the local man walk­ing around town all morn­ing with a loaf of bread under his arm, or peo­ple tak­ing the dog out 20 times a day, but the streets were mostly empty, es­pe­cially in the less com­mer­cial areas,” he says.

At the same time, San­tacreu stresses that the pub­lic also gave the po­lice a lot of sup­port. “We have never been ap­plauded so much as dur­ing the lock­down. Some­times, when local peo­ple saw a pa­trol, they would clap their hands spon­ta­neously,” he says.

Yet, the chief in­spec­tor is less ap­prov­ing of other more ex­u­ber­ant ex­am­ples of be­hav­iour, es­pe­cially those by some po­lice of­fi­cers that even went viral on so­cial media. “We were asked to mark birth­days by sound­ing the siren of pa­trol cars, danc­ing or car­ry­ing bal­loons, but it was ob­vi­ous that we could not and should not do that, no mat­ter how much fun it seemed. It wasn’t se­ri­ous or ap­pro­pri­ate,” he re­calls. He has no juicy anec­dotes of the past nine months, al­though he does re­call some local res­i­dents hand­ing of­fi­cers packs of water bot­tles.