20% fewer robberies: nine months of police reinforcements at El Prat Airport

The Prat de Llobregat"Juanito, what's going on at the airport?" Joan Alfred Vives, deputy inspector of the Mossos d'Esquadra and head of the Regional Airport Security Area, received a call one Sunday in September. On the other end of the phone was the director of the police, Josep Lluís Trapero. That day, the ARA had published a report about the crime situation at the airport, where property crimes, especially theft, had increased tenfold in a decade. The news spread quickly within the Ministry of the Interior, and its leaders were asking the same question that Trapero would ask minutes later to the airport's top police official: "What's going on at El Prat?"

At a press conference, Vives admitted this Thursday that the figures were "very complicated." His response to Trapero's question was: "We have very little muscle and the demands are very high." This was the starting point of a police action plan to "reduce the crime curve," in the words of the Minister of the Interior, Núria Parlon. First a reinforcement of agents arrived and over the months its effects began to be noticed, with a drop in thefts, as this newspaper explained. All of this has led to a meeting between the Mossos d'Esquadra (Catalan police) leadership and the consular corps in Catalonia—who expressed great concern about the data—to explain this drop.

If there were 126 officers stationed at the airport in September 2024, there are now 203. The peak of crimes was in October, with 1,000 thefts, and the decline began to be noticed in February. The trend has continued to be positive, to the point that in May it closed with almost half the number: 637 in 2024 and 343 in 2025. The balance is a 20% reduction since the start of the plan. Parlon stated that they are going "on the right track."

Repeat offenders

The battle has been against a large group of repeat offenders who were visiting the El Prat airport facilities every day to steal. The increased number of officers has been accompanied by dialogue with the Prosecutor's Office and the judiciary, which has already issued 58 restraining orders from the airport since September (around 30 are still active). In parallel, the Mossos d'Esquadra (Catalan police) are deploying more Aena cameras to quickly identify repeat offenders and arrest them. Patrols are also being intensified to make officers more visible and improve the perception of security, in addition to a group of 22 plainclothes officers who are undercover following the thieves.

The vast majority of thefts occur in the public area of ​​the airport, and 65% are accidental thefts (when you lose sight of your suitcase for a moment and someone steals it). "The job is not over," Trapero stated, speaking to the Mossos d'Esquadra police chiefs in the southern metropolitan region, Commissioner Eduard Sallent, and in Barcelona, ​​Commissioner Montserrat Estruch. In fact, Vives warned of a possible shift in the crime to other locations and, as explained by AHORA, the first robberies have been detected on nearby roads. The most complicated days tend to be Fridays, Saturdays, and Monday mornings.

That the work is not finished is also demonstrated by the fact that in the coming months the Mossos d'Esquadra will likely gain responsibility for the airport's airside (once they pass security controls), and a new reinforcement of officers will be necessary, which Parlon has linked to new promotions. The reinforcement, he said, will be defined by the assumption of new powers and not so much the expansion of the airport announced by the Catalan government. This increase in police activity has also been accompanied by dialogue with businesses, which have invested more in security.

In parallel, Vives referred to three sexual assaults that have taken place in recent months against three female employees at El Prat Airport, two of them perpetrated by two homeless people. The Mossos d'Esquadra have arrested more people than ever in recent months, causing the facilities at the El Prat police station to become too small. Therefore, a prison cell will be inaugurated at the airport on Monday to hold those arrested.

The homeless

A hundred people sleep at the airport every night. Last FebruaryAena began a pilot test to expel them on certain nights, arguing that the area needed to be cleaned up. "At that time, everything was unsustainable," said Vives, adding that the situation in Barajas It's "much more serious." In any case, the police chief has limited the Mossos' actions to supporting the Aena operation and channeled them through private security guards, and that it is an ordinance approved by the State's legal services and linked to the health of the facilities. "We helped them see that it wasn't an expulsion," he concluded, confirming that the access controls, as already explained by AHORA, remain.