This is how street thieves work: one theft every three minutes

BarcelonaThe 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.

"It pays to steal," explains a Mossos d'Esquadra commander, who points out that this is one of the keys to understanding the multiple repeat offenders, perpetrated by thieves who make theft their way of being in the world. They make a living by committing crimes, even if they are arrested and tried, and are arrested again the day after leaving prison. They do this because, according to the same source, they know they face a "manageable and quite unlikely" punishment. Although thefts are decreasing, police arrests are increasing every year. However, "being arrested by the police is not a punishment high enough to be a deterrent," reflects the same commander. This explains why there are 452 multiple repeat offenders in Barcelona who committed 9,114 crimes in 2024. The five most active ones accumulated 189 arrests in a single year, up to 37 each.

What could be a deterrent is a prison sentence, but speedy trials, when it comes down to it, are slow. The courts are trying to solve this problem by creating more courts, but they admit that the effect will take time to be felt. The Mossos d'Esquadra (Catalan police) are also trying to find solutions and have commissioned a member of their command to thoroughly analyze the conflict of multiple reoffending. The first outlines of this study, according to ARA, will likely begin to appear this week. However, the bottom line is that it takes a long time for a multiple reoffender who works nights to receive the consequences of the robbery they committed at three in the morning on Thursday, March 27, 2025.

Just as the city was on its feet, Thursday's second repeat offender was quick to act. It was 8:30 a.m. when he stole a backpack from someone coming down the stairs at the metro entrance on Villarroel Street. Initially, the thief was lucky, as the bag contained a computer valued at €400. Eventually, his luck turned sour when the police arrested him a few meters away, on Urgell Street. What this thief, with several previous convictions, was after was one of the most prized possessions of repeat offenders. Bags and wallets are the second most stolen items in Barcelona (21% of cases), behind cell phones (41.9%) and ahead of chains (15.2%) and watches (10.6%), a growing trend.

The techniques

Sometimes it all starts with a cigarette, like the one two young men asked a man for while walking through Ciutat Vella at five o'clock this Sunday afternoon. As he was taking out his pack of cigarettes, however, they grabbed his wrist and took his watch. But it wasn't just any watch, it was a Richard Mille, black with a white strap, worth no less than 250,000 euros. And other times it all starts with a hug. It's the technique of the so-called mimosas, women who hug you while they empty your pocket. Or with a random stain that a stranger has made, seemingly unintentionally, with a cup of hot coffee, and which they then make an effort to clean. In reality, they're also making an effort to see what you have inside your backpack. Or with other more football-like techniques, like doing a Ronaldinho, when a thief tries to play with your leg while taking your cell phone.

However, there are some robberies that are as easy as taking advantage of a crowd on the subway or simply running away. The Thursday robbery begins with the theft of the watch and the theft of the backpack, and continues at noon at an H&M store in a shopping center in Poblenou. It's 1:30 p.m. and a man and a woman have just entered the store, grabbed several items, and ran away. However, security guards managed to detain them.

According to police sources, repeat offenders don't have a homogeneous profile, although they tend to be young. Some steal out of desperation, because they have no way to live, and this often means they are foreign nationals. Others steal to pay for drugs, or are foreigners who only come for the summer season. A final, more organized group robbery is done because they are cheap. "They could work, but this is more profitable for them," police sources point out. They know all the watches so they can steal the most expensive ones, and they commit few robberies, but they prefer to steal from victims with money.

Victims tend to be tourists, as they typically carry more cash and report less. According to police sources, this means that the hottest spots for thefts coincide with areas with the most visitors. Ciutat Vella is the focus of thieves and police, but there are also the areas around the Sagrada Família, Barceloneta, the busiest stations (such as Sants and Plaça Catalunya), and El Prat Airport. In fact, the airport, as the ARA has explained on several occasions, has been the paradigm of repeated offenses, with groups even dividing up the areas. Now, with more officers and the implementation of restraining orders from the airport, the situation is beginning to improve. However, thieves are being found stealing on the access roads due to the increased police presence at the building.

Receiving items

On Thursday, the repeated offenders continued on the AP-7 motorway near Girona, when a man distracted two Ukrainian citizens so they could stop on the hard shoulder and stole a computer, a tablet, two cell phones, and €5,500 from their car. It was already 7 p.m., and a few minutes later, another alert arrived at the Lleida Mossos d'Esquadra police station: someone had stolen several products from a Lidl supermarket. Everything happened very quickly. The thief fled by car, and meanwhile, in Girona, the Mossos d'Esquadra had already geolocated the Ukrainians' computer in a cell phone store. By 8 p.m., they had arrested the thief and recovered the items. Nothing more was known about the Lleida thief.

The police caught the Girona thief just as he was trying to replace the stolen items, and this is also one of the keys to combating repeated offending. The Mossos d'Esquadra are focusing their investigations on the groups that receive and resell the items, a key component of this business. They spread out across apartments, many of them in the Raval district, and distribute the stolen goods through parcel services, usually in other countries. In fact, according to police sources, Barcelona is becoming an epicenter for cell phone reselling; stolen phones arrive from other parts of Spain and even Europe.

Perception of insecurity

Several police sources consulted agree that crimes linked to repeated offenses are not the most serious and often do not involve violence, but they are the most visible, and this increases the perception of insecurity. Sources from the City Police indicate that they have marked 85 points in the city where there is a uniformed presence precisely to combat this feeling. The number of security cameras will also be tripled, which deter thieves but also serve to investigate robberies. The fight against repeated offenses is also led by dozens of plainclothes officers who patrol the most sensitive areas of the city every day and track repeated thieves. They have a document with the faces of the most frequent offenders and look for them among the crowds of people who descend on La Rambla every day.

Repeat offenses on Thursday are coming to an end. Friday, like almost every day, is expected to be busy in the courts. There are a dozen trials for thefts under 50 euros. These include robberies in shopping malls, stores, or supermarkets, but there are also pickpockets in the subway or thieves in the beach area. Most are repeat offenders: by the time they go to trial, they've already stolen at least three times before.