Some 22,000 people who request an appointment to file a complaint with the Mossos d'Esquadra in Barcelona do not show up.
If you do the procedure online, the waiting time is reduced by half, although it is not easy to find an appointment from one day to the next.
BarcelonaIf you are the victim of a crime in Barcelona right now—a scam, for example—and want to make an appointment with the Mossos d'Esquadra (Catalan police) to report it, it will be difficult to find a time slot overnight. You'll have to search extensively among the available times at the various central police stations in the city; this will be practically impossible if we ignore the night and early morning time slots. In Ciutat Vella, for example, there is one at 8:15 a.m. on Thursdays, and this situation is repeated in Sants, Sarrià, and the Eixample district. 232,000 crimes could be reported. Of these, 199,000 could be reported using the appointment system, which is only available for certain types of crimes, such as threats, damage, scams, theft, bodily harm, occupation, and loss of documentation, which use it. 40%.
One of the problems the Mossos d'Esquadra detect is that many people make an appointment but ultimately don't show up without canceling. 74,000 were booked (67% of the total). However, only 52,000 reservations were made: 22,000 people booked an appointment, didn't cancel, and didn't show up at the police station. They move on to the next on the list. However, they admit that there are many empty hours that, because they haven't been canceled, no other citizen can use. ARA.
In Barcelona, the waiting time for citizens who file a complaint with an appointment is 10 minutes and 23 seconds. Deputy Inspector Jordi Muñoz, head of the Regional Unit for the Investigation of Accidents (URIA) in Barcelona. In 2019, before online appointments, this waiting time was close to 29 minutes.
The busiest time to report crime is usually midday, while early morning and late at night tend to be more crowded. This also depends on the police station; the most central ones are the most congested. The police's main recommendation is to report incidents at the nearest station to the location where they occurred, but they also point out that they can be reported at any police building. This allows citizens to play around with schedules. This Wednesday, for example, there are more available hours in Cerdanyola del Vallès.
Muñoz makes it clear that an appointment is not mandatory and that whenever a citizen goes to a police station to report a crime, they will be attended to, although they will likely have to wait longer if they don't have an appointment. There are certain more serious crimes, in fact, that cannot be reported through this system and, once at the station, they receive preferential treatment. However, he appeals to people of responsibility and asks citizens to cancel appointments when they cannot attend. The Mossos d'Esquadra themselves send reminders about reservations with messages, and they can be quickly canceled. "The system works very well," assures the sub-inspector.
From the police station, officers don't usually book appointments if a citizen shows up, except in cases of elderly people, for example. The sub-inspector defends the personal and calm treatment this strategy allows. "It's the star system for citizen service," he asserts. In this sense, the Mossos d'Esquadra have also opened up, since last summer, the possibility of reporting lost documentation or requesting authorizations for minors entirely online using the digital certificate.
