The right to not be liked by the Police

PalmaA typical Monday, in a classroom of a typical Primary school, in a typical town in Mallorca, any agents of one of the State's security forces and bodies, teach the children the benefits of their work. Some bring dogs, so they can pet them, others will explain to them that their mission is to protect them.

First practical lesson in cognitive dissonance for some of the children who have attended these sessions: the demonstration on July 26th in Ciutat against the tourist model. There, with eyes like oranges, they see live how everything those agents, full of good intentions and jokes to try to win them over, had told them, vanishes. How they play their games, these adults.

The mobile phone footage of the disproportionate aggression by the National Police against a young Barça fan this Sunday in the vicinity of Elche's stadium reminds us too much of the charges by the same Spanish police force just a month ago in Palma. More or less, and looking at the images, the pattern is disturbingly similar: perfectly legitimate political expressions end up provoking a police response that the images hardly allow to justify. In other words: citizens treated as a threat not for what they do, but for what they represent.

In both cases, Elche and Palma, internal investigations have been announced by the respective delegations of the Spanish government. Today – a month after the events – the Delegation of the state government in the Balearic Islands has not yet made public any results regarding these inquiries.

The cases are not isolated and suggest a police culture that deserves examination and indications of a structural problem. Cases are accumulating where the State's machinery is set in motion to lecture people it considers to be on the wrong side of History. Carrying a Catalan flag: bad. Being critical of the tourist model: bad. Having a certain political or ideological position: bad.

Brief non-encyclopedic compilation: the charges of October 1, 2017 in Barcelona against very dangerous grandmothers carrying a ballot in their hand. The arrests with handcuffs of two women who had spray-painted five real estate agencies in Santa Maria, searches, and a questionable action. The riot police charges against the 15-M movement in Palma in 2011, which left about twenty injured. The Cosso's charges with tear gas by the Civil Guard in Felanitx in 2011, who carried a stuffed kookaburra and a damaged pallium as weapons. The disproportionate intervention by the National Police and the Local Police of Valencia against the residents of the Cabanyal neighborhood in 2010, who wanted to prevent the demolition of buildings in the neighborhood. The pursuits, arrests, and charges during the Valencian Spring of 2012, which denounced cuts to public education. In this latter case, the senior police chief even referred to the protesters as the enemy. The enemy were underage students, that is, children, who demanded adequate classrooms, heating, or simply, to be able to go to the school toilet and find toilet paper.  

And we finish. Let's also remember the Confeti case, which also resonates in this sequence: “No damage or harm of any kind was caused (...). No claims of any kind were made. Public order was not disturbed (...) and, above all, no act of violence of any kind was committed,” stated the verdict, which ended with the acquittal of all defendants, for whom the Prosecutor's Office had requested 29 years in prison. And here the problem worsens when the State's response turns peaceful protests into cases that drag on for years.  

We have a serious social problem if the security forces and bodies too often show signs of inability to apply the principles of congruence, opportunity, and proportionality in the face of peaceful demonstrations or actions that, as evidenced by multiple actions, contradict them. Their function or action cannot vary based on sympathy towards the ideological expression that is presumed to be held by citizens.  

We already know that Article 104 of the Spanish Constitution states that security forces and bodies will have the mission of protecting the free exercise of rights and freedoms and ensuring public safety. We also know that Organic Law 2/1986, on security forces and bodies, establishes that they must act, in the fulfillment of their duties, with absolute political neutrality and impartiality and, consequently, without any discrimination on grounds of race, religion or opinion. We also know that this same law states that they must maintain and restore, if necessary, public order and safety. And here lies the loophole that allows the unjustifiable to be justified. But the debate is not whether we like the Police's actions, in general, or not, but whether they must respond to democratic obligations.   

I may be bothered and even offended that more and more police officers wear bracelets with the Spanish flag, but I can do nothing about it and I don't have to. For the same reason, an officer may be offended that a Barça fan wears a Catalan flag, and in a democratic state governed by the rule of law, they should also not be able to do anything about it because, in a democracy, feeling offended does not empower anyone – and even less so those who exercise authority – to restrict rights.   

Citizens have the right not to be liked by the Police. They have the right to express ideas that make them uncomfortable or contradict them, because their function is not to decide which opinions are acceptable, but to ensure that all can be expressed within democratic limits.  

Let the gray echoes of not-so-distant past times not cloud the democratic principles set by a Constitution, paradoxically, so often invoked.