A few years ago, most people preferred cash to pay for and make their day-to-day purchases. Today, with a smaller proportion using it, but still above half, the objective is different, and the option of cash has more to do with turning it into a kind of safety net to face unforeseen events. An important reason is to deal with electronic failures, such as the one caused by the blackout the country suffered on April 28th of last year. Back then, many discovered that it is important to keep cash at home because many ATMs, the main way to obtain money (80% of the citizenry claims to use them habitually); and many card terminals stopped working for hours.

It may seem like a cliché, but the phrase "you cannot put doors on the countryside" summarizes to a large extent what the police and judicial fight against large international criminal organizations is like. This phrase, uttered by General Pedro Antonio Pizarro, head of the Civil Guard in Catalonia, has resonated at the College of Notaries of Catalonia, where members of police forces, the judiciary, and the notariat have banded together to face one of the main challenges not only for Catalonia, the State, or Europe, but also for the world: dismantling the economic structure of the mafias.

The Urda tragedy makes me reflect on safety mechanisms in transport, whether for automobiles, trucks, airplanes, or trains.

"It didn't take us by surprise, the facts deny it." With these words, the Director General of Police, Ferran López, has denied that the Mossos d'Esquadra did not expect the riots on Saturday in Barcelona. The demonstration had a level 2 out of 3 rating and, as this newspaper has already been explaining, they carried out 300 checks on young people before the gathering and also confiscated hammers, pyrotechnics, sprays, stones, and balaclavas. There had already been some 'Blocus'-style demonstrations before, one in Manresa, for example, without incidents. But the police were indeed surprised by the violence of the young people. "We did not correctly gauge the level of violence, we had never seen it before," admitted López before an opposition that criticized the Mossos for not sufficiently anticipating this scenario, to the point that Junts has requested the resignation of Minister Parlon.

Carles Feixa is a professor of social anthropology at the Department of Communication of the Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), specializing in the study of youth cultures.

How to stop the domino effect of Telegram channels and social media accounts calling for new riots of the Blocus style, as seen on Saturday in Barcelona, is currently one of the main concerns of the Mossos d'Esquadra. Doing so by requesting a court order is a process that can be slow, and platforms often have slow rhythms as well. For this reason, as ARA has learned, the Catalan police have requested help from CITCO, the Intelligence Center against Terrorism and Organized Crime, which depends on the Ministry of the Interior.

Adif is struggling to keep up with copper thieves. The state-owned company, which manages the Catalan railway network, is facing serious logistical difficulties in finding the copper cable needed to replace all the material stolen from it in recent months. As ARA has learned, this year's flood of thefts, which exceeds all records to date, has pushed the company's reserve stocks to the limit, and it is now scrambling to cover all the needs required by the network and keep the system running.

"We only talked about that with friends. About Paris. About the videos appearing on TikTok. I wanted to protest," he says, now free. The phone rang at two in the morning. It was the Mossos d'Esquadra and they had arrested the boy. The next morning they went to the City of Justice and entered a room full of relatives who, like them, were surprised, stressed, worried. Fathers crying. Mothers denying that their son was capable of doing all that. They reunited with him. All the children were minors and all had been arrested for the disturbances that were recorded this Saturday night in Barcelona. "It was chaos. There were only two lawyers for all the children," the relatives comment.

"There are many international actors who are interested in weakening Europe, which is the last bastion of liberal democracy". This warning from the former Italian Minister of Defence between 2014 and 2017, Roberta Pinotti, hovered over the room at the Sant Pau Modernista Precinct where 200 people invited by ARA attended the Enfoquem conference to analyse the state of European security. The diagnosis that Pinotti drew is very clear: Europe is a kind of garden in a wild world that has suddenly been left without its guardian and now has to run to protect itself. It must wake up. The most explicit threat is the Russian one, but there are many more.

"A website from the jihadist environment affiliated with Daesh has been detected where a call is made to attack both the police and protesters in the protests taking place in various European countries. The publication specifically mentions Spain". This is one of the most prominent points of an internal alert, to which ARA has had access, which has been issued by the Ministry of the Interior and which the main State security forces have received.

1. The data will say that crime is falling in Catalonia. Nothing new, we already know this. The official figures always arrive cooked up by great chefs of institutional communication who prepare them to smell good. Whoever is in charge, it is a common practice. As much as claiming that the perception of risk goes one way, amplified by social media, while reality is much less dramatic. The other communicative habit of those in power is to label every serious event as an isolated case. And, therefore, the general public – those who go through life in good faith, which we are still the majority – should not worry because, mid-morning, on Balmes Street in Barcelona, at the corner of a Spanish police station, a man shoots another in the brain, kills him, flees on foot, and leaves the gun at a bus stop. Then they console us by saying that it was “an isolated case” and, therefore, we should not worry, because it was not a random homicide that happens to just anyone, but rather the murderer knew very well who he had to execute. That's fine then, we can breathe easy now.

"We cannot wait for more things to happen to take action." With these words, the chief commissioner of the Mossos d'Esquadra, Sílvia Catà, summarizes what is happening with youth gangs in Catalonia: they are smaller groups than in the 2000s, much more heterogeneous and flexible, with less presence than back then, but they exist. And, for the first time, the Catalan police are providing figures on the phenomenon. According to the Mossos d'Esquadra's calculations, there are a thousand young people in the orbit of these gangs and approximately half can be directly classified as members. This data is the result of months of research, with more than 600 diverse sources consulted, ranging from a police report of an incident to an informant. All of this has led the Mossos to create the Proa, a specific plan to fight against youth gangs. This Thursday it was presented within the force and it will be launched in November.

A man was shot dead this Friday afternoon in a tattoo parlor in Badalona, according to sources consulted by ARA. The Mossos d'Esquadra are at the scene and have opened an investigation.

During the first six months of 2026, incidents in which someone fired a bullet in Catalonia have increased by 45%. That is to say, a shooting has been recorded every two days, with a toll of six dead and seventeen injured. If cases where someone has brandished a firearm, even if they did not get to use it, are added to this, there is one incident a day. And, in these cases, real weapons are becoming increasingly common: they already represent 42% of the total, when until recently the majority were simulated. Behind this increase are various causes, such as the fact that weapons are becoming cheaper, are more available, and there are more criminal groups that need them to defend their businesses, which are closely linked to drugs.

"If you don't help us, we will kill you. Do you know what it is to be a gangster? We will cut off both your hands so they can make you an ear." It is November 15, 2022, and alleged members of the Casuals, the criminal group that was born from the Boixos Nois, held a man in a house after kidnapping him by force and putting him inside a car. He was a friend of a caretaker of a marijuana plantation who owed money to the feared Casuals. They tied him up in a house and threatened him: "Nobody plays with the Boixos Nois," they warned him. Finally, they set him free and this illegal detention was one of the starting pointsof a major judicial case by the Mossos d'Esquadra against the Casuals.Last Saturday afternoon some men dressed as police officers kidnapped another man in the middle of the AP-7, in front of the gaze of many drivers who witnessed how they pulled him out by force, assaulted him, and took him away. Later, they released him a few kilometers away. Apart from coinciding in the method, this latest illegal detention also coincides with that of the Casuals because everything points to it being related to a marijuana plantation that the victim was supposedly guarding and that the police discovered in 2025. On Monday, another man was also kidnapped in Barcelona, beaten up, and released near a gas station in Salt.

The Spanish legislature is in stoppage time. The general elections will be in 2027 –more and more voices are pointing to the first quarter–, so now conversations are intensifying regarding projects that are in the pipeline and will have only one opportunity in these coming months to move forward. One of them, as indicated by various sources consulted by ARA, is a proposal from the Catalan government to toughen the Penal Code for crimes involving the possession of weapons, which is already on the table at Moncloa. Specifically, it is proposed to double prison sentences in the case of carrying prohibited weapons –currently they are 1 to 3 years of deprivation of liberty– and to create a new crime for the exhibition of weapons in public.

Between 1984 and 2024, invariably, the independence movement (or, rather, the sovereignty movement) always held a majority in the Parliament of Catalonia. But the end of the 'Procés' sank the electoral prospects of the parties that had driven it and cleared the way for Salvador Illa to enter the Palau de la Generalitat. The third socialist president also arrived with all the cards to break the curse of one-term presidents and, with practically no opposition, it was expected that he could consolidate his leadership.

The year 2017 changed many things, including the Mossos d'Esquadra police force. From the beginning of the deployment throughout Catalonia in the 90s until the October 1st referendum, the Catalan police only had four heads of the force, the last one being Josep Lluís Trapero. The prosecution of the major of the Mossos for the events of the autumn of 2017 opened a period of instability that has not yet closed – although now it is strictly due to the internal tensions of Catalan politics and the force itself –. Since 2017 there have been nine appointments for head of the Mossos, one per year. "Can you imagine a company with more than 20,000 employees that changes its CEO every year? It wouldn't be sustainable," comments a police source.

"She will do well", "She is a good professional and a very good person", "She is good", "Good choice". It was already past ten o'clock on Tuesday night and it was not yet known that Commissioner Sílvia Catà would be the new head of the Mossos d'Esquadra. Even so, several Mossos commanders were already endorsing her choice in these messages. All the polls were betting on her, the until now head of the Mossos in Girona, or Commissioner Montserrat Estruch, the head of Barcelona. In fact, Estruch even started as the favorite.

Absence of paternal figures, lack of supervision during childhood, school absenteeism, difficulty in emotional management, impulsivity, low commitment to society. These were some of the conclusions of the psychologists who had treated the two minors, aged 15 and 16, arrested last week in Manresa for the fatal stabbing of a 45-year-old man. Both had criminal records and both, as ARA has been able to reconstruct from various sources, have had a troubled childhood and have caused constant conflicts in the centers where they were educated, from which this complex situation had been repeatedly warned about.