Is Barcelona unsafe?

When I chose to name my Barcelona chronicles for The New Barcelona Post La Punyalada (in homage to our genius Marià Vayreda and his almost unrivaled gore style), it was difficult for me to imagine that, after the last La Mercè festivities, daggers would become part of our capital's imagery. Indeed, the fatal stabbing of a young man next to Plaça d'Espanya, the subsequent looting of many shop windows and stores in the Creu Coberta neighborhood, and the clumsy reaction of the City Council (more interested in disassociating the murder from the Main Festival than in showing itself capable of explaining why police presence had not been increased in the area despite the insistent warnings from Sants merchants), have caused an increase something much less intangible but much more decisive than crime rates: the feeling of insecurity.

Is Barcelona an unsafe city? Well, as always happens with metaphysics, it depends on who we ask. If it were my beloved costella, who is initiating herself in an art as old as the city itself called anti-Barcelonism or hater-Barcelonism, it would be something similar to the Bronx of the 70s. If we pay attention to the state Ministry of Interior, we would see that the index of criminal offenses in Barcelona is not among the highest in Spain (a country where, as my beloved psychiatrist always reminds me, we kill each other more with insults than with lashes) and, depending on the aspect, much lower than in Madrid. In the first quarter of 2022, Barcelona had suffered 2 intentional homicides, 6 attempted murders, 38 sexual assaults with penetration, 2,918 violent robberies, and 16,684 thefts (the figures for kilometer zero for the same crimes are: 7, 1, 2,162, and 23,277).

It is true that Madrid is a more populated city, but statistics clarify things quite a bit. On a planetary level, and even peninsular, neither of the two cities can be described as unsafe and violent places. But this is where politics appears and we can observe the bias: while Isabel Díaz Ayuso has managed to make Madrid seem like the paradigm of prosperous Western happiness, almost like an independent republic, Barcelona has been living existence with parsimony and depression for some time.The opposition to Mayor Colau has exaggerated crime rates to wear her down, when the most important thing here is not the data but the context. There is a feeling that Barcelona is an unsafe city due to its unstimulating character, because it does not exude any kind of primacy among the world's leading cities and, ultimately, because stealing and drug dealing here is just another option for survival.In The StabI have warned on more than one occasion about the exodus our city will experience, a flight of inhabitants that responds to a precariousness that future inflation will make exponential and against which no City Council official is working. Objectively, Barcelona is not unsafe, and anyone who has lived in cities where violence is an unwritten norm will burst out laughing at the alarmism of our most hysterical columnists.But the feeling of insecurity increases when one lives in a precarious place, not only poor in economic terms, but above all in ambition and discourse of power. There are cities with a great past of turmoil that, however, have kept their economy intact. But Barcelona is not the capital of a state and does not have as much strength to survive the adversities of crime.

But the feeling of insecurity increases when one lives in a precarious place, not only poor in economic terms, but above all in ambition and discourse of power

Ours is not a city where it is normal to be stabbed on a corner. Nor, unfortunately, a city that has an administration capable of responding to the very legitimate concern of a part of the population that feels insecure. And given the octogenarian alternatives to the current political cenacle that governs us, the future is enough to get depressed, leave the work of a columnist, and switch to that of a drug trafficker.