In Barcelona, Spain’s second largest city, police have admitted that over three quarters of the arrests that took place during the first half of this year were foreign nationals, despite the fact they compose 17.6% of the population. The vast majority of crimes are connected to theft, drug trafficking, violent robberies, and domestic abuse.
The data, released last week by the Guárdia Urbana de Barcelona, the city’s municipal police force, has revealed that of the 2,939 individuals who were arrested and detained in the city in the first six months of 2022, 2,247 of them (76%) were foreign nationals, the Spanish daily newspaper El Debate reports.
The news comes roughly eight months after the Ministry of Justice of the Generalitat published figures that revealed that more than 41% of the prisoners sitting in Catalan jails are foreign nationals.
Commenting on the figures, president of the conservative party ‘Valents’ Eva Parera, who also serves as a councilor spokeswoman for the party’s municipal group on Barcelona’s city council, said that the figures evince previous statements made by her and her party concerning foreigners’ disproportionate involvement in crime.
“A few months ago we denounced that close to 80% of crimes committed in Barcelona were carried out by foreigners, an obvious problem for people who are not integrated into the city,” Parera said, adding that illegal violent gangs “are committing crimes such as the sale of drugs.” Parera lamented that she and her team—for the statements—had been smeared as racist, xenophobic, and purveyors of fake news by the mayoral campaign of Barcelona’s Ada Colau.
“In Valents there is nothing of all this, in Valents there are people who explain things as they really are, exposing them in the public debate because this is our job as public officials and responsible opposition in the Barcelona City Council,” she continued, adding that “no one will be able to refute” the figures “provided by the Guárdia Urbana itself.”
The disproportionate amount of crime committed by foreigners in Barcelona is a trend that has been observed in other metropolitan areas throughout Europe as well. In fact, earlier this month, data extracted from police records that was released by the French Ministry of the Interior revealed that in the first six months of 2022, foreigners in Paris—despite composing some 15-20% of the city’s population—accounted for 70.4% of violent robberies and 75.6% of thefts, as The European Conservative previously reported.
