The Popular Party candidate for the elections, Alejandro Fernández, stated this Monday in an interview on the RTVE program Cafè d'Idees, that “Barcelona is, according to all data, the second most unsafe city in Europe, only surpassed by Brussels”, and that it has “326 crimes per 100,000 inhabitants”. This statement, which the Popular Party candidate has repeated on other occasions, is misleading.
The first part of Fernández's statement is not verifiable, since the concept of insecurity encompasses many indicators that have not been grouped together to make a comparison between European cities. The Popular Party establishes a relationship between insecurity and recorded crimes, but there are no international comparisons of crime by city because criminal typologies are different in each country and because police data on recorded events do not usually coincide with the criminal typologies included in the criminal codes. . That is, the terminology changes within the same country. The smallest regional level analyzed and compared in the European rankings, in the case of Spain, are the provinces and not the cities.
The figure that Fernández gives corresponds, specifically, to robberies with force. According to Eurostat data from 2021, the latest published, in this specific typology of crime, the province of Barcelona occupied second position in the ranking, after the Brussels region, which recorded 325.56 robberies with force per 100,000 inhabitants. At the time of publishing this verification, the Popular Party had not clarified to Verificat the origin of its data.
Barcelona, however, does not lead the ranking in any other category of crimes analyzed by Eurostat. In the classification of intentional homicides and assaults, which includes intentional or reckless physical actions that result in serious bodily injury, it is not even among the top 300 positions of the 1,255 European regions analyzed.
In the category of thefts from establishments, the province of Barcelona is beyond position 100 and, in fact, Girona, Tarragona and Lleida, in this order, are placed above Barcelona, despite the fact that they are all far from the first position. Girona is in 31st position in the ranking of robberies in private residential properties and Tarragona, in 48th. In robberies, Ibiza and Formentera are in a higher position in Barcelona with 667.78 robberies per 100,000 inhabitants, while Barcelona accumulates 618 .28, far from the region that has the most, Byen København in Copenaghen, with 4,558.64 per 100,000 inhabitants.
The last crime for which data is collected is the theft of a motorized land vehicle, which includes the theft of cars, motorcycles, buses, coaches or trucks and, in this indicator, Barcelona does not have any predominant position either, with a record of 77, 26 cases per 100,000 inhabitants. The first position registers 758.09 and corresponds to Barletta-Andria-Trani, an Italian region.
