Starting this Thursday, the Ciutat Vella Mossos d'Esquadra will be able to transport their detainees on foot to the police station cells. After more than five months of conditioning works, on November 2, the 17 cells in the custody area of the police headquarters on Nou de la Rambla street will be opened.
The Ciutat Vella police station will not be limited to hosting its detainees, but a new unit will be in charge of preparing the report that accompanies each arrestee to the Ciutat de la Justícia, when they are brought to justice. In recent weeks, these police officers have received training at the regional report instruction unit (URIA) of Les Corts, in whose basement the Barcelona custody area is located.
The cells of Les Corts, which have been obsolete for too long and maintain the same procedures of the last century, comply with the legal requirements and have the ISO certification that corresponds to their procedures, but the working conditions are harsh and the situation of the cells, scarce, without natural light and with poor ventilation, means that on numerous occasions it is the subject of complaints by social entities.
At the time, Major Josep Lluís Trapero already left in writing the need to find a new location for the custody area, a project that remained unchanged after his termination. Those who later tried to dust off that project of looking for a new location or forcing the Department of Justice to allocate a space for detainees in the Ciutat de la Justícia, did not have much success. A year and a half ago, the previous head of the Barcelona region, Commissioner Marta Fernández, obtained approval from the leadership to patch a situation that was becoming unsustainable and enable the cells at the Horta and Ciutat Vella police stations.
The Horta dungeons were opened in June, and since then they have been used as “sleeping cells”, where detainees spend the night who have to be transferred the next day to the Ciutat de la Justícia when there is a collapse in Les Corts.
The project in Ciutat Vella is much more ambitious because the police station's own police officers will be in charge of instructing and writing the report of the detainees in their district. The new procedure will start on Thursday with the idea of managing the first few days of no more than half a dozen detainees a day until the equipment operates at full capacity.
Of the hundred arrests that both the Mossos and the Urban Police carry out in one day in the city of Barcelona, twenty have Ciutat Vella as the scene. When the district manages its arrestees, they will stop losing the citizen security patrol cars that are being mortgaged to carry out the transfer to Les Corts, where there is not a day that they do not have to wait hours in lines because the admission procedures collapse the center. While they queue in Les Corts, they neither patrol, nor do prevention nor go to services upon request.
Among the improvements that have been made in the Ciutat Vella cells are increasing the height of the wall that protects the toilet in each cell or installing a lighting system that distinguishes between day and night.
