Happy to help, sir

So there I was, wan­der­ing down Pas­seig de Gràcia with a friend for the first time in who knows how long, mind­ing my own busi­ness as the sun peeked cau­tiously though the clouds, promis­ing to turn this into a beau­ti­ful morn­ing stroll in the sun­shine, when out of nowhere ap­pears a clearly very ag­i­tated uni­formed in­di­vid­ual bark­ing in­struc­tions. The in­di­vid­ual in ques­tion was wear­ing a Mossos d’Es­quadra uni­form - for those who don’t know, that’s the Cata­lan po­lice force.

What on earth had got this Mosso so wound up to be openly shout­ing at us from two me­tres away in the mid­dle of Pas­seig de Gràcia? Well, ac­cord­ing to him, it was the fact that we had both turned around and bla­tantly ig­nored him when he had shouted for my com­pan­ion to pull her mask up over her mouth.

Al­though not strictly rel­e­vant to my point here, which will be­come clear soon enough, let me pre­sent the facts as I saw them. I had turned around a few sec­onds ear­lier when I heard some­thing, but I cer­tainly hadn’t seen a po­lice of­fi­cer or heard any ac­tual words. I can’t speak for whether my com­pan­ion turned round, as I don’t know if she did or not, but she hadn’t heard any­one telling her to put her mask up, or she cer­tainly would have done. As an aside here and again not rel­e­vant to my point, she’d pulled her mask down to breathe more eas­ily for a few sec­onds, as she is a smoker. Now, I know what you may be think­ing - the Mosso was per­fectly within his rights to stop us and even fine my com­pan­ion if he thought she was flout­ing the law, which is ex­actly what he pro­ceeded to do, and I have no ar­gu­ment with that. As I have al­ready said, the point here is not one of law.

The point is one of trust and re­spect. As I ex­plained to the Mosso, if we had seen and heard him, we would have heeded his warn­ing about wear­ing the mask prop­erly. We do not go around dis­re­spect­ing mem­bers of the forces of law and order. Hav­ing said that, the Mosso’s ini­tial re­ac­tion should not be one of dis­trust and dis­re­spect to­wards two or­di­nary cit­i­zens strolling through the city cen­tre. Once he had heard our re­spect­ful apol­ogy and re­alised it was a mis­un­der­stand­ing on his part - no one had de­lib­er­ately ig­nored him - he should have left us with a warn­ing about being more con­sci­en­tious and let us go on our way. But he didn’t. He de­manded doc­u­men­ta­tion and would have fined my com­pan­ion had his part­ner not come run­ning over shout­ing “To the Bat­mo­bile Robin!”, forc­ing him to aban­don his petty cru­sade and de­part with a scowl on his face.

Like my­self, my com­pan­ion has lived in sev­eral other coun­tries, and she was ap­palled at the treat­ment we re­ceived in her first brush with Cata­lan law en­force­ment. The way I see it, you gain re­spect not by wear­ing a uni­form, but through your own be­hav­iour, and dis­trust­ing and dis­re­spect­ing cit­i­zens is no way to go about it.