The mayor of Premià de Dalt (Maresme), Josep Triadó (JxCat) has contracted the controversial extrajudicial eviction company Desokupa as a pilot test for a year, to advise the City Council in its fight against the occupation mafias, for a cost of 3,000 euros per year.
A decision that many judge as an electoral maneuver and that others, such as the president of JxCat, Laura Borràs, fully rejects: "we do not share these hirings and we work to combat occupations with new tools that Parliament will approve" he wrote on social networks . To which the mayor replied that "when these measures are active we will stop hiring these companies."
The option chosen by Triadó has raised blisters since Desokupa has accumulated 26 criminal complaints since 2017 by the Mossos d'Esquadra, for crimes of injury, fraud, coercion and illegal home occupations. The controversial company is famous for its coercive methods to evict squatters from homes. “Desokupa will not act directly in Premià de Dalt, it will advise the Local Police” clarifies the mayor, “we are interested in your great experience”.
Despite the fact that this year there are no illegal occupations and last year there were three and five aborted attempts by the police, the mayor insists on the need to fight against the illegal mafias of the occupation, especially the gangs from the East that also "generate criminal activities alternatives, such as marijuana plantations, robberies, drug trafficking, assaults and threats” and are established in the occupied houses as “criminal operating centers”.
For example, on May 24, 2020, all the alarms went off in Premià de Dalt when 40 Roma people occupied an empty house very close to the second residence of the former president of the Generalitat, Jordi Pujol. A large mobilization of Mossos and Local Police prevented it, but forced to increase security in the area.
Of Desokupa, the mayor values his experience "not the ideology" and much less the media effect that is implicit with the company, "but the great effectiveness of his mediation methods". He also assures us that "we are not aware of any conviction of the company."
Triadó understands the controversy of his decision but deplores even more "that Catalonia is the paradise of the squatting mafias" and that "mossos and police transfer their impotence to you when repeat offenders are released" without legislators doing anything to avoid it. He does not understand the mayor that if in advanced countries like France occupying a home carries prison sentences, here the sentence is two years, without going to jail and that five thefts are punished with an economic penalty. In short, a serious problem that has had a direct impact on municipalities with very limited resources to eradicate this type of crime. In Catalonia, last year there were 7,345 complaints of house searches, 42% of the total for the entire State.
Since 2017, the main concern of the municipal government of Premià de Dalt, which governs JxCat in majority in agreement with the PSC, is security. "With the time change every year we must activate all security mechanisms" because criminals take advantage of the darkness with the proximity of the wooded area to commit assaults and robberies.
Premià de Dalt is one of the municipalities that has a very scattered population in urbanizations. For this reason, the City Council chaired by Josep Triadó promotes greater security measures. Thus, it has been specially reinforced by the Mossos since 2017 and cameras that read license plates and the environment since 2018. A year later it was the first Catalan town to establish a body of watchmen to reinforce night surveillance.
