The contact is quick and you have to be attentive not to miss anything. One guy approaches another and they exchange a few words. Sitting on a terrace to disguise himself and at a prudent distance, it's impossible to know what they're saying, but it can be interpreted. One gives some coins to the other. At that moment, the seller takes something out of his pocket and hands over, one by one, small things, as if they were coins, to the buyer's hands. The customer has already paid and after this exchange they separate with the satisfaction of having done it quickly, without anyone having seen them. But some plainclothes police officers appear and arrest them. The buyer is carrying several Lyrica pills in his pocket. The seller ends up arrested for a crime against public health.

A man walks, swaying more than usual, through the streets of Barcelona's Raval neighborhood. He carries a can of Voll-Damm beer in his hand. It's dark, but not yet six in the evening. He glances both ways, trying to spot if anyone is following him. Finally, he stops in front of a doorway. It's number 3 Vistalegre Street, next to the Raval promenade. The door is made of opaque glass, and there's no light inside. He scans his surroundings again and decides to take the plunge. He knocks and waits. No one answers. He grumbles. He knocks again, this time more forcefully, and shouts in case someone hears him. Again, his calls go unanswered. Disappointed, he turns around and disappears back into the narrow streets of Ciutat Vella.

The room is large and spacious, with many screens on strategically placed tables. Arranged in a semicircle, they all face the same point: a wall with even larger screens displaying feeds from some of Barcelona's security cameras. They can see all the cameras in the city. This joint police control room is located on Lleida Street. During the Olympic Games, it served as the competition's server room, but for the last 20 years, it has been a nerve center for city security. Officers from the Mossos d'Esquadra (Catalan Police) and the Guardia Urbana (Barcelona's Municipal Police) are present. Next door is another room for the Barcelona Fire Department. On one screen, there is a Excel The system is color-coded: green indicates available resources, and red indicates those currently in use. Today, almost everything is green. It's a quiet day, but those in charge explain that these rooms are bustling with activity on key dates. Two important dates are coming up: New Year's Day and the Three Kings' Day parade.

Pedro Velázquez (Barcelona, ​​1967) has been the head of Barcelona's Guardia Urbana (municipal police) since 2019, a force he joined more than three decades ago. After years of rising crime rates, the indicators began to decline, especially those for robberies. But insecurity remains among the top concerns of Barcelona residents.

HeBarcelona Urban Guard agent who fired a shot in 2020 A homeless man who was walking along Passeig de Sant Joan with a knife in his hand has been acquitted without ever having to go to trial. The judges of the Second Section of the Barcelona Court of Appeals have dismissed the Arrels Foundation from the case at the last minute. This has overturned the only remaining accusation against the officer, as the Prosecutor's Office did not accuse him of any crime, and the victim's lawyer was also dismissed because the man who lived on the streets, Marjan, has been untraceable for years.

In Barcelona, a lot happens every day. The police receive almost 500 calls a day and make 83 arrests., There are eight demonstrations and protests, and up to 19 traffic accidents. In the six months from January to June 2025, 83,646 crimes were committed, the vast majority (up to 71,555 incidents) against property. Following the trend of recent reports, the Catalan capital continues to see a decline in burglaries and thefts, which have fallen by 34.5% and 6.8% respectively, and now represent the lowest figures in recent years. Also falling are robberies with violence and intimidation (-3.2%), fraud (-3.5%), and vehicle thefts (-9.7%). On the other hand, according to police data, neither crimes against persons, which rose by 2.8%, nor crimes linked to drug trafficking (+26.9%), are being reduced.

The workday starts early, so early that there are three hours left until sunrise and tourists are still entering the nightclubs of Port Olímpic. It's 3 a.m. this Thursday when one of the first robberies of the day is reported in Barcelona. At the exit of a nightclub, an IWC Portofino Chronograph watch, valued at €6,000, is stolen. The number of property crimes is declining—the lowest rate of thefts in the country since 2017—but the pace remains frantic, with 23 thefts every hour in Catalonia, and almost half that number, 10, in Barcelona. People tend to calculate the costs and benefits of an action. Such as choosing a night job (more sleep, fewer meetings with friends, but more money) or buying an electric car (more expensive, but fewer emissions and less money on gas). Thieves don't live in a world apart, and those who started their workday so early calculated that the cost of being caught was much lower than the profit they achieved in two minutes of work.

Rosa Peral's lawsuit against Netflix for the series The body on fire The trial was supposed to start today, but it did not happen after the judge decided to suspend the preliminary hearing that was to be held in the court of first instance of Vilanova i la Geltrú (Barcelona). The former agent of the Barcelona City Guard claims 30 million euros for violation of the right to honorr, in her own image and in the personal privacy of her and her daughter, a minor, who also appears represented in the fiction. At the request of the prosecution, the judge has postponed the hearing because Peral has had her custody of the minor suspended since she entered prison. The magistrate has given the girl's father ten days to say whether he wants to be the one to claim his rights.

Insecurity is the main problem for Barcelona residents, with almost 29% of the Catalan capital's inhabitants thinking so. The police and their political leaders often stress that these are perceptions and argue that the data do not always match this feeling of the citizens. In the case of Barcelona, ​​​​crime fell in 2024 to the point of reaching the lowest figure since 2016 (always ignoring the pandemic period). This means that last year 180,342 crimes were committed in the city - more than 20 every hour - a figure that is equivalent to almost 10,000 fewer crimes than in 2023 and 34,000 fewer than in 2019. The assessment of the mayor of Barcelona, ​​​​Jaume Collboni, is one of caution. "It is the beginning of the consolidation of a new trend. The recipe is working," said Parlon after the local Security Board of Barcelona.

Viruses permitting, after two years of the pandemic, this summer will again resemble 2019, the last before covid struck. Since Easter, the city has been full of tourists and even more are expected to come. Their increased presence is linked to a growth in crime, often with foreign visitors as recurring victims. Thefts and robberies, in fact, are already above 2020 numbers – when crimes bottomed out – and last year, but still below 2019, when they reached an all-time high and there was talk of a "security crisis" in the city. With this data, the Guardia Urbana and also the Mossos are preparing for a summer that will bring back some old problems, although not all: the presence of street sellers in Barcelona is at a minimum, according to data from the City Council.

The Casc Antic and Barceloneta have never been quiet neighborhoods when summer arrives, but this year, with the end of the restrictions, the situation exceeds any past time. The desire to party, mainly among young people, complicates the weekend nights, which in this part of the city begin on Thursdays. "It's very bad. The noise is much worse than it was before the pandemic", complains Elena Marti, a resident of Barceloneta. "As the beach has been one of the first places to open, it's as if many people have discovered it and have taken a liking to drinking there", she says. Another place that seems to have more and more people every day is the Born. In this neighbourhood the party started even before the end of the state of alarm and has now increased. "I understand that it has been very hard and that young people need to go out and socialize, but not everyone has to suffer this. We need to sleep. With the narrow streets of the neighborhood the sound rises a lot", says Asun Justo, a member of the Association of Neighbors of Casc Antic. The organization began to receive complaints from neighbours about the noise at night and decided to convene an assembly to address the issue: "So many people came that we had to take the chairs and change places because we could not fit", explains Asun. At that meeting, some neighbours decided that from midnight on they would start throwing water from the balconies, that they would start collecting signatures to take them to the Ombudsman and that they would demonstrate in the streets of the city. The Barceloneta Neighbourhood Association joined the call scheduled for today and this afternoon hundreds of residents of the two neighbourhoods have taken to the streets to demand a response from the City Council. The protests have begun in different neighbourhoods and have coincided in the Via Laietana with Princesa street, where they have cut traffic with posters calling for "enough noise" and demanding "the right to rest".