To the most sleepless and internet-savvy fellow citizens, a video must have appeared on their mobile phones in which a Chinese photographer, specialized in taking reports of newlyweds in the Gòtic, immobilizes a thief who had stolen his camera with the help of a group of hitmen. Despite being very brief, the document shows the photographer strangling the pickpocket with the technique popularly known as mataleón ---a device rather patrimonialized by muggers, consisting of attacking the victim from behind and pressing their neck, choking them, so that they lose consciousness--- until the police arrive, arrest the thief, and the public applauds wildly. This scene could be a tourist attraction in itself, not only given the enormous number of Asian photographers who walk around Sant Felip Neri in search of the cutest snapshots, but also due to the normalization of thefts around the neighborhood.
All this happened last Tuesday, but it could have happened any other day. At home, we are used to it, especially in summer, when at night Sant Sever street becomes a real chase track between some slot machines that enter the Call while a poor tourist shouts "my watch, my watch" (we recommend, therefore, that visitors from all over the world go out to dinner without their watch, even more so if the object in question exceeds one hundred euros). It must be said that, since the arrival of the PSC to the administration (and of lieutenant Albert Batlle as district councilor) this scene has decreased in frequency and more police presence and civic agents can be noticed in the neighborhood. But the structural problems, as the pretentious would say, still remain. In fact, next to my house, a mythical drug den has reopened where, from time to time, some polydrug addict has given us great nights of shouting and insomnia.
At the end of the incident I was telling you about at the beginning, the police ended up appearing in a few minutes (the thug in question, therefore, was able to recover the lost oxygen) and the Chinese photographer also reunited with his work instrument. But the applause at the end of the video marks something more worrying than the security problem, and that is that particular frenzy of citizens who are happy about the existence of individuals who, through acts of apparent heroism, end up replacing police negligence. In fact, although it may seem to have nothing to do with it, in Catalonia the number of people who have applied for a weapons permit has notoriously increased (this server has several friends who have done so) and not only as a recreational tool to dedicate themselves to firing some shots on Sundays and thus face the week with something less tension. The greater the risk of insecurity, the citizen can fall into the rather atavistic and pre-modern tendency to believe that they can replace the police.
Individual actions serve to excite the networks, but they will not end the thieves who roam the city.This is not good news, not only because a more armed society is not usually safer (as the case of the United States very well certifies), but because it feeds the notion that, with our public powers and their consequent services, citizens are not sufficiently protected. The case of the Chinese photographer in the Gòtic may seem very trivial, because it is a theft, and the violence used is rather defensive; but the general applause of the spectators of the brawl leads one to imagine a new context where the citizen not only distrusts the public order forces, but also the judicial system which, as has happened in this case, has ended up leaving the outlaw free, despite accumulating a dozen similar robberies. Since I have memory, politicians promise to toughen the law on theft, but this reform seems more costly than building a pyramid. Today, in the neighborhood, there will be more pranks like this.
That the people act as police or judge is never good news, no matter how much the act in question has served to recover a camera, detain the kleptomaniac, and cause momentary relief to a very serious problem. Barcelona continues to need more police officers (especially at night) and more street agents to give us security while we walk in the dark in a neighborhood illuminated with criteria similar to those of Transylvania. Individual actions serve to excite the networks... but they will not end the thieves who roam the city. No matter how much applause the spectacle (or the joke) of seeing a Chinese man strangle a Moroccan man, while the Barcelonans applaud happily, may generate.
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