I arrive at the Mossos de Les Corts Police Station, a geometric building with narrow windows where the offices of our police headquarters are located. Agent Dani Pérez greets me with a friendly smile that makes the place seem warmer and we go through the door control. He gives me a tour of the building, a labyrinth of austere rooms several stories high where the Office of Citizen Services, groups such as Fraud, Criminal Investigation or Internal Affairs are located.
The communication department is a small room full of computers with that electricity that newsrooms have. In what they call the "briefing" room, the division of tasks at the beginning of each shift, we met with their boss, Caporal Quim Estrada.
Its function is to communicate the activities of the Mossos d'Esquadra to the public, manage social networks and respond to requests from the media (around 5,000 a year), but it has caught my attention that they also serve filmmakers or writers who they request information.
I ask him if his eyes widen when he sees the barbarities that appear in movies and books, but he smiles kindly: “You can take as many creative licenses as you want and it's fine to do so. If you explained the reality of an investigation to the letter, with the hours of camera views, the verifications, the trades in court... viewers would fall asleep. But it is true that when there is not a minimum of rigor you see things that squeak you”.
They explain a series in which a police officer brazenly enters a judge's office, rudely asks her for wiretaps and, when she doesn't grant it, slams the door... "Things don't work like that, if a judge doesn't grant a few listens, what you do is withdraw and return to request it with more evidence or a better argument”. Or an intriguing series like Inocente on Netflix: “It is set in today's Barcelona, and the police officers that appear are not Mossos d'Esquadra!”
His eye is trained to see all kinds of kits, like a TV3 series where the Mossos wore the stripes on their uniforms sewn backwards. Of course, they welcome the rigor of a series like Crims.cat that works on real crimes: "It is helping to give a more humane vision of the police officer."
I ask him about the biggest difference when telling an investigation in fiction with respect to reality: “Perhaps the personalization of the investigation in literature or cinema. They show one investigator running it all, day and night, doing everything from surveillance of suspects to interviewing witnesses. In reality, researchers have normal lives and work as a team. They work morning, afternoon and night shifts.
Dani Pérez believes that “the public has a more romantic idea of the profession, bombarded by that American vision of the super detective in Hollywood” and Estrada points out that “it is also true that the American police have other limits that are very different from ours”.
Seasoned writers come to them who are going to consult specific aspects: “They ask you if a sergeant can be the head of an investigation group or if the presence of the judge is always necessary in the removal of a corpse. What we don't explain are specific investigative techniques." They also get other greener ones. "It should be pointed out to someone that it is not the same to set up a surveillance in Barcelona than in a tiny town in the Pyrenees, that as soon as the Mossos car enters, even if it is not logotyped, they immediately realize it."
And there is no shortage of undecided: “Someone comes to ask you if the idea you have in your head, almost always a complex crime, turns out to be a crazy case. And we answer: It depends how you explain it! If some time ago a writer had gone to an editor with the story of a case like the crime of the urban guard judged in 2020, perhaps they would have rejected it as implausible.
They explain to me that "we are at an average of 60 homicides a year in Catalonia" and there is a crucial piece of information for storytellers: "In many of these cases the element of passion intervenes."
