“2022 will be the year with the highest violent crime ever seen by any generation alive, except during the civil war,” according to Samuel Vazquez. A criminologist and president of an association called Una Policía para el S.XXI (a Police Force for the 21st Century) or PSXXI, Vazquez testified before a commission on violent crime held by Madrid’s regional parliament.
His observations (abridged and translated by The European Conservative) concerning the historic rise of violent crime in Madrid and Spain in general are remarkable:
2022 will be the year with the highest violent crime ever seen by any generation alive, except during the civil war. We are going to live through the same levels of crime as those in France and Sweden.
This year, the summer festivities [in Madrid] bore witness to multiple fights and stabbings. Last week, two people were killed by firearms.
The citizens of Madrid will continue to suffer the increase in crime until voting patterns change. Only when those politicians who currently deny the problem, and accuse people of racism for bringing it up, feel they may lose votes, will they begin to change their discourse and take action.
Immigration has an impact: both a positive one, as with food or music, and a negative one, as with delinquency.
The chief of police in Sweden (a primary school teacher) implemented gender policies, quotas for women in the police, gun control … 15 years later, it is the country with most deaths by firearms, the most violent assaults, and the most gang rapes.
At this point in the testimony, Podemos member Serigne Mbaye accused Mr. Vazquez of racism, to which he replied:
I am not going to insult you [back]. Describing reality is not racist. In fact, immigrants who are integrated into society encourage us to talk about these problems.
He pointed out that even in the course of the hearing, some of the politicians present had inadvertently used the term Bandas Latinas, (Latin Gangs) despite considering it racist, because “the truth imposes itself.”
Madrid’s Chinese neighbourhoods were later mentioned, to which Mr. Vazquez commented, “I know of no gang rapes or machete assaults committed by Chinese nationals [in Madrid].”
Concerning the issue of ‘inequality’ as a cause of crime, to which Mbaye referred, the president of PSXXI opined that:
Inequality does not influence crime as much as origin and culture. The “Latin Kings” and “Dominicans Don’t Play” gangs are so-named for a reason. The use of the machete is new to Spain. They replicate behaviours from their countries of origin.
To this he added that there are cultural habits and religious beliefs that are incompatible with Western society.
At this point, another member of the commission accused the officer of not providing any data to back up his claims, prompting the following response:
According to data from the Ministry of the Interior, all violent crimes, sexual assaults, beatings and stabbings, homicides and attempted homicides are on the rise. … The way the government currently calculates the crime rate gives the same weight to a rape as to a robbery.
This means that if robberies go down more than rapes increase, the result—on paper—is that the crime rate has decreased.
According to Eurostat, however, we are the country in Europe with the second highest number of assaults and violent robberies—in addition to the fact that all violent crimes have increased. The reality does not match the data provided [by the government].
The hearing was valuable for providing expert analysis of problems the government is clearly eager to cover up: the increase of violent crimes and the growing presence of foreign criminal gangs in Spanish cities.
