"We cannot be like this every week": businesses cry out for more police force due to the riots

BarcelonaIt is a quarter to twelve in the morning on a Thursday and the vast majority of shops on Pelai street, Plaça Catalunya and the lower part of Passeig de Gràcia are operating at half capacity. The day after the riots in the center of the capital, once the general strike demonstration had finished, many businesses remain boarded up, many with a small opening to let customers in through a glass door that in many cases has graffiti or is directly broken or punctured. "They've destroyed everything," comments an elderly couple looking at the glass, completely cracked, of the shopApple of Plaça Catalunya, which has not opened today. “When they threw fire inside we decided to leave”, explains one of the workers who is managing the repair of the store. He complains that yesterday at noon they were already working to protect the business and that “it was of no use”.

The attempt to protect the Geox store on the corner of Passeig de Gràcia and Gran Via was also of no use. In this case, the windows are not cracked, but have been reduced directly to pieces on the ground. “What am I supposed to do? Remove them myself?”, one of the store managers asks with a certain desperation, shaking her head. She asks the workers who have come to board up the store. “We board up, but we don't remove glass,” one of the workers replies, while the other talks on the phone to try to clarify who should do what.

“We cannot be like this every week,” the shoe store manager keeps repeating, while inside the workers are collecting the scattered sneakers that are still on the floor. Next door, the Victoria’s Secret store did not open at all, and a few meters further on, the Lego store, completely boarded up, did not either. A little further down, a Stradivarius store did open, but workers are working hurriedly to put a vinyl covering on the glass, which is completely cracked. “If we don't put it on now, any little tap could make it shatter and it could fall on people,” he explains.

Beyond the broken glass, what most big brand stores or franchises have are paintings and graffiti, both on the display windows and on the walls surrounding them. Up to fifteen teams, each with a van loaded with paint, have been busy since early in the morning scrubbing and repainting each and every one of the paintings in just the center of the Catalan capital. “We’ve been at it since seven in the morning and we’ve only done half of Pelai street,” laments one of the cleaning workers, who admits that in recent weeks “they have had to be making constant reinforcements.”

A police action to “restore order”

Facing another difficult night and with around ten businesses vandalized, Barcelona Oberta, which brings together 24 commercial hubs in the city, reports “unease” among merchants and demands “more forceful solutions.” This Thursday morning, in a media briefing, the president of Barcelona Oberta, Gabriel Jené, demanded a police response that “allows for the restoration of order” when “chaotic situations” like those experienced on Wednesday occur. In fact, Jené admitted that it “caught their attention” that there was no capacity to “have a plan from the point of view of more repressive police action,” considering it was already known that there were “infiltrated” groups that wanted to cause damage. According to Jené, the circumstances of the demonstration “surpassed the reality” of the security operation.

From the entity, they explained that, unlike the Blocus riots, the general trend was not theft, but rather vandalism. Although they have not yet assessed the economic impact of the disturbances, Barcelona Oberta recalled that, in addition to broken windows and shopfronts, fires were also set at some entrances of the businesses, something that “will require time to restore” normality and that “a significant number” are working to repair the damage.