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.

"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.