A lone, unarmed city guard is powerless to stop a mass combat between a family and several young people in the street and in broad daylight in Alcover (Tarragona). Several young people followed another man with whom they had had grudges to his house and began to beat him until the victim’s family intervened. Upon learning what was happening, the parents of one of the candidates violently attacked the attackers, sparking a fight that was joined by a local municipal guard, alone and unarmed.
Despite this, the municipal guard, which replaces the local police in the small towns of Catalonia, confronts the Spaniards and foreigners participating in the fight and tries to stop it without success. Up to six people participate in the fight, hitting each other with belts and punching and kicking each other for several minutes.
From time to time, the municipal guard manages to separate the fighters who have come to stop traffic in the area by moving the fight to the center of the road. Finally, the guard manages to calm things down until the arrival of the Mossos d’Esquadra.
Shortly after, the Mossos managed to arrest the two young men, aged 24 and 23, who started the fight, on charges of alleged offences of wounding. One of them was carrying a knife that he did not use during the fight. The officers also identified the three other members of the rival group present in the fight to charge them with the same crime.
Individual patrols
The images recorded by witnesses of the fighting revealed the difficult conditions in which the municipal guards work, who act alone in “individual patrols” and work without weapons, despite legal limitations. They are the ones who assume security tasks in Catalan municipalities that do not have a local police force.
The members of this auxiliary body have expressed their indignation over the events in Alcover on the networks and are asking the Generalitat to improve their material and legal working conditions: “The municipal guards continue in legal insecurity, without defense tools and with little and differentiated training with the rest of the police force. Nobody gets to work, we are talking about 380,000 citizens from 150 small towns discriminated against and 500 agents forgotten.
The detainees were taken into custody at the Valls court on Wednesday, September 18.
