There are words that everyone knows will make headlines, and for that very reason they are spoken. This is the case of the mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni, with the phrase "We don't want this riffraff in our city", referring to organized gangs using firearms to kill each other. Folk sounds energetic. It is a quintessential example of the end of politically correct language and is the type of expression that the far-right has plundered on the streets to convey a firmness close to the death penalty and to empathize with frightened voters. It is the language that a part of the left has been adopting so as not to be left behind when it began to admit, too late, that public security policies were left-wing, because the rich right could always afford private security.
Gentiles, but, it is too easy, because at the same time that it lowers the category of delinquents below the threshold of people, it incompletely describes a serious criminal phenomenon that produces homicides with firearms in the streets of a capital considered safe like Barcelona.
Of rabble there are many kinds, but here we are not talking about moral categories and undesirable behaviors, but about organized crime, about what councilor Parlon has described as "criminal industry behind drugs", about delinquency that in other countries has bought, threatened and killed individuals, police officers, politicians and judges until it simultaneously became the crime and the law that controls the territory de facto through terror. The Mossos investigation units face a global phenomenon that knows that Catalonia – and Barcelona in particular – is a well-located base of operations and a large market for the drug business. They are much more than a bad neighbor, and it will make us feel safer knowing that we are in good hands than a popular qualifier.
