From Thursday, the Mossos d'Esquadra de Ciutat Vella will be able to transport detainees on foot to the police station's dungeons. After more than five months of conditioning works, the 17 cells in the custody area of the police offices on Carrer Nou de la Rambla opened on November 2.
The Ciutat Vella police station will not limit itself to receiving those arrested, but a new unit will be responsible for examining the certificate that accompanies each arrestee in the City of Justice, when they are brought before the court. During the last few weeks, these officers have received training at the regional unit for the instruction of attestations (URIA) in Les Corts, in the basement of which is the Barcelona custody area.
The dungeons of Les Corts have long since become obsolete and maintain the same procedures as the last century. They meet 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 – few, without natural light and with poor ventilation – means that they are often the subject of complaint by social entities.
In his day, Major Josep Lluís Trapero already left in writing the need to look for a new location in the custody area, a project that came to nothing after his termination. Those who later tried to recover that project of looking for a new location or to force the Ministry of Justice to allocate a space for detainees in the City of Justice did not have much success. A year and a half ago, the previous head of the Barcelona region, Commissioner Marta Fernández, got the go-ahead from management to rectify a situation that was becoming unsustainable and enable the cells of the police stations in Horta and of Old City.
The dungeons of Horta were opened in June and since then they have been used as "sleeping cells", where detainees who have to be transferred the next day to the City of Justice when there are collapse in the Courts.
The project in Ciutat Vella is much more ambitious because it will be the cops from the police station who will be in charge of instructing and drawing up the certificate of those arrested in their district. The new procedure will begin on Thursday with the idea of managing a maximum of half a dozen detainees per day for the first few days, until the equipment is working at full capacity.
Of the hundred arrests that both the Mossos and the Urban Guard make a day in the city of Barcelona, about twenty take place in Ciutat Vella. When the district manages its arrestees, the public security patrol cars that are being mortgaged to carry out the transfer to Les Corts will no longer be lost, where there is not a day that they do not have to wait hours in queues because the management of 'admission collapse the center. While they are queuing at the Courts, they neither patrol, nor do prevention or go to services on demand.
Among the improvements that have been made to the Ciutat Vella dungeons are those of increasing the height of the wall that protects the toilet in each cell or installing a lighting system that distinguishes between the day and night
