quote:

I don't think cops who stop people randomly and demand to see their IDs are doing their jobs.

MapMan,

Here is a question. What hardcore evidence do you have to support this? This is overgeneralizing, something that we simply cannot do. Until we see the exact job description of a police officer in Spain, we aren't sure that your statement holds any merit.

Shawn

i think the stopping and asking for id is based on both profiling and is also often times random and consecuential.

Phil, if you had ever met mariposita you would realize that it could not have been a profile that made them stop her, she is the littlest most innocent looking thing in the world.

i think it was due to the situation, she was running and perhaps that made them suspect something.

Rocco and i were stopped on preciados a while back as well. i wrote about it on another thread. we wre speaking english and returning to my office from lunch. must admit it could have been profiling since Rocco is a shady looking character indeed

quote:

In most democratic countries with decent civil rights, police don't have the right to stop someone in a public place and physically search him/her without a warrant or some sort of legitimate cause for suspicion or fear for public safety or the safety of the police officer. (Of course it still happens.)

yes, i agree that asking for id is ok but i believed they cross the line when they frisk someone. i wish we knew the law on this and i anxiously await the response you get from the embassy Phil.

as for your getting stopped more than once, i can understand your frustration. not personally but my brother used to get stopped every few weeks or so when he was backpacking around the world after college. he spent a few years travelling and he would tell us stories about him being stopped at airports and on the streets.

i once made a half-joking comment that he should get a transparent backpack like the pocket-books that they make dept. store employees use in u.s.a. (or used to anyway).

saludos,
jer...

quote:

Rocco and i were stopped on preciados a while back as well. i wrote about it on another thread. we wre speaking english and returning to my office from lunch. must admit it could have been profiling since Rocco is a shady looking character indeed

Personally, Jer, if I were a cop, I wouldn't stop Rocco, but I would stop you and give you a good searching over big boy.

Shawn

Hey MapMan,
Have been reading this thread with interest. I have been stopped and asked for ID, which is legal in Spain even if you're not doing anything, but have never been frisked like that.
I was talking about this thread last night with an acquaintance who is a "guardia civil" and to my surprise he wasn't too sure about the law in that situation. He does not work detaining or arresting people and his job is pretty specialized so I guess it's not part of his job description. He did say that maybe the reason for the cops storming the place is the disturbances that took place on Plaza del Dos de Mayo the last couple of weeks and that some of the people involved were taking refuge walking into bars and pretending to be customers there; or that they are still looking for people who attacked the police which are regulars in the area. That is an interesting possibility. I think another one could be that the cops are sort of trying to sort of make their presence known or even terrorize a bit the regulars who would be likely to engage in further "botellón" and cause more trouble. And I could have easily been hanging out there because it's an area I like, but I do admit that if I know that public disturbances and heavy, physical police action have been taking place in a certain neighborhood I will avoid it for sure. Which still doesn't excuse what happened. My boyfriend, who was also present, thinks that the cops were totally way off base and that if they do not have a valid reason (like evidence that you have or are about to commit a crime or are carrying weapons/drugs/etc.) or a warrant they cannot search you without your consent. Of course, he is German and the German police and laws are a lot more strict, and this was just an educated opinion, he doesn't know for a fact what the law here says about it either.
By the way, one thing that this guy did say (without me telling him that the cop said that too) was that you were lucky because in the US you'd have gotten beat up. I told him I didn't think that was the case and that after events like Rodney King and such the police were being more and more careful about what they did to whom, but it is interesting that the US police forces do seem to have a nasty reputation here, among their counterparts and are considered to be much worse than in Spain. And knowing how many cases there have been of police brutality I do wonder if it's deserved and true or not.
Have you talked to the US embassy? Lawyers? Keep us updated, we’re interested in what is going on and this could be very helpful for future cases of foreigners facing police abuse.
Lena

quote:

Keep us updated, we’re interested in what is going on and this could be very helpful for future cases of foreigners facing police abuse.

But, can this case be classified as abuse or harassment? Which one is it?

Merriam-Webster says:

quote:

Main Entry: 1abuse
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French abus, from Latin abusus, from abuti to consume, from ab- + uti to use
Date: 15th century
1: a corrupt practice or custom
2: improper or excessive use or treatment : misuse <drug abuse> <abuse of tranquilizers>
3obsolete : a deceitful act : deception
4: language that condemns or vilifies usually unjustly, intemperately, and angrily
5: physical maltreatment

Once again, the reason that I am responding like I am is to try and find the right word for this situation. I was not there to witness any of this.

Shawn

I apologize if I did not express myself correctly. When I used the word "abuse" I was thinking about the improper or excessive use of power and/or authority by the police forces. I believe that those cops did what they did, regardless of whether it's physical abuse or harassment or just plain rude behavior, because they felt they could do it and get away with it, and until MapMan gets to the bottom of this we wont know if what they did was legal or not and how the judicial system in Spain will respond to what happened. I also used that term because in my job and in my personal life as a foreigner living here, I have heard of other cases of the police forces abusing their power when treating foreigners and minorities, particularly because they feel those people are even less likely to know their rights or complain or take legal action against them.
If there was anything ilegal about their actions that night in Malasaña then something should be done about it, and there are plenty of cases that one hears about in the news in which cops have been suspended, fired or even sent to jail when they deserved it and when they overstepped the law and the citizens' rights. And it would also be good to know what the law says about it so that any of us faced with MapMan's situation in the future can make an inteligent choice about refusing to be searched and being willing to be arrested and taking it as far as we want to, but knowing what our rights are and what the law says about it.
I guess at this point I'm more interested in the content and the outcome than in the semantics of it. But Redwood, I still think that you're right and that the language is important and specially in cases like this we need to be very careful about the words that we use and how they are interpreted, because some words can be very inflamatory and provoke very strong and emotional reactions, not to mention have legal consequences.
Lena

Hey everyone,

I am sick as a dog right now and possibly have carpal tunnel to boot, so I am going to take a break before posting and answering any requests for a few days... In the meantime, you can read the following article which I think is relevant to the discussion. I do not agree with this guy politically (I am as pro-capitalism as you get) but really, that is not the point...

From http://www.counterpunch.org/gelderloos05192007.html

My Arrest in Spain
The Easy Road from Tourism to Terrorism

By PETER GELDERLOOS

"I'm a tourist! Tourist!" I protested, somewhere in the dungeons of the Guardia Urbana located inconspicuously along La Rambla.

"¡No!" the cop yelled back, wagging his finger. "¡Terrorist!"

On the street just above me, only minutes after the alleged terrorist act, all the other tourists were strolling calmly, perusing postcards and tapas menus, glancing over the stands of books set out for the St. Jordi holiday, 23 April, watching the performance artists who always line Barcelona's signature pedestrian avenue. There was no panicked stampede, only the same mundane crush that always drowns the city. But then, I wasn't exactly arguing with the voice of reason. The cop was sure I was a terrorist because he was sure I was a squatter, and he was sure I was a squatter because he thought I looked like one (I was wearing a political t-shirt and had some slogans scribbled on my shoes).

In fact, it was the squatter's assembly that had organized the little protest on La Rambla. They had a festive, balloon-lined banner that read, in Catalan, "a city without squats is a dead city," they handed out flyers arguing against gentrification and explaining the reasons for squatting, and they concluded the little event by firing off a petardo, a little firework cannon that shoots flyers into the air. It made a damn loud noise, perhaps louder than intended, but in the end it was only that-a noise. But the police, always training for the worse, came in and made it worse. They charged in yelling, and adding an element of panic the firework never did. I was in the area and I saw the police running-at this point they were chasing one of the protestors-and I did what I would have done in the US: follow the cops to see if anyone was arrested, if they needed help, if they were being beaten. A couple blocks away the police had thrown someone up against a wall. I watched until they told the crowd to disperse, but as I was walking back to La Rambla, one cop looked me over suspiciously and asked me a question. I explained I didn't speak Spanish very well, and showed him my passport, which he took and walked off with. I had to follow him all the way to the police station, where I learned I was under arrest, charged with illegal demonstration and public disorder. Because they allege the public disorder was carried out with explosives, I am facing between three and six years imprisonment.

After two days in the police dungeon I had the privilege of being yelled at by a judge, who described the protest as an "urban guerrilla" and alternately "paramilitary" action designed to hit La Rambla when the largest number of people would be present, in order to send the message that the squatters were a military force. At one point during my statement he interrupted me to yell that in the US I would be thrown in Guantanamo for such an action. He gave me a 30,000 euro bail (which a secretary later told me she had never seen for such charges in 25 years of working there) and sent me to Modelo prison.

At this point I should admit I am not a typical tourist. I hate tour guides, I don't like attractions, and I don't have much money to spend. I've been travelling first by bicycle, then by hitchhiking, sleeping in parks, with friends, or with people I just met. My main interest, besides studying languages, is learning about Europe's radical social movements. I want to abolish capitalism, and I understand tourism to be part of that. But as much as I try to stay on the pure side of my principled disctinction between travelling and tourism, I did enter Spain on a tourist visa and for the unimaginative purposes of the law a tourist I am. Even anarchists take vacations.

Mine, oddly enough, had landed me in the same prison that once housed many of the anarchist revolutionaries of the Spanish Civil War. Once I arrived, I got down to just about the only thing one can do in prison: waiting, and organizing my new life within its much diminished horizons. At first I was under the impression that trial would come within a few months, but soon I found out it may take two years.

On 22 May, another trial starts in Barcelona after two years of waiting, and the verdict may put five innocent people in prison for three years and nine months. They were arrested on 25 June, 2005, when the police attacked a demonstration organized in solidarity with the Italian anarchist movement, which had recently been repressed in a wave of over 180 raids, 25 arrests and a number of imprisonments on the instrumentality of a vague, guilt-by-association law. After the police attacked the Barcelona solidarity protest, a few windows got smashed, and the detainees were charged with assaulting the police and public disorder, and they are faced with ridiculously high fines for damages. One of them was arrested before any property destruction took place, and others were not even in the same location as the smashed windows.

And this is just one of a long list of cases of repression, of activists arrested on fabricated charges. But as much as the Barcelona police have a vendetta against squatters and anarchists, along with immigrants and anyone darker than them, this repression is not a grassroots initiative: it's an order from on high. "The Mediterranean triangle" sounds like it could be a vacation package for sunbathers but in fact it's the term applied by the European Union to what it identifies as a top internal security threat-the anarchist movements in Greece, Italy, and Spain. These states have been directed to neutralize the threat, and it seems they will do whatever it takes. In my case, they have found two cops to testify that they saw me and the other person arrested set off the petardo (well, they're calling it a "mortar"), that some kind of projectile shot out of it, and that we ran away and were subsequently arrested. For some reason, the judges in Spain are inclined to believe the police, even to see them as neutral and uninterested, unless they are faced with a large amount of contradictory evidence. I would say that the police and the criminal justice system in Spain have not changed much since the days of Franco, and there is truth to this, but it's besides the point because in the US they are just as bad. In fact, in my brief experience prison in Spain is better than in the US-more privacy, less aggression, better food. Not that they don't torture people in Spanish prisons just like they do in the US (hopefully no one has forgotten already that the torture regime in Abu Ghraib was exported from home).

Torture by police is an element in another ongoing political case in Barcelona, involving three squatters framed for the serious injury of a cop who was guarding a house where drugs were sold. The three were arrested, disappeared for a few days, and tortured, with bones broken, hair pulled out, bruises all over. Over a year later, they are still in prison awaiting trial. The police use other terror tactics besides torture against the squatters' movement. At the beginning of May, in a pre-election frenzy, the Barcelona police illegally evicted a number of squatted social centers. Their MO is to go in several dark vans with ski-masks and guns, break down the doors at six in the morning, seize documents and copy computer files, pull out and identify all the occupants, and sometimes saddle them with criminal charges as well. And the corporate media play their part, with frequent articles libelling squatters and describing them as a menace to society, as terrorists even (just as they played the same trick on the radical environmentalists in the US).

Why exactly does the squatters' movement warrant this kind of attention? Probably because it is the spearhead of the battle for the city. All across Barcelona, buildings are being gutted and rebuilt. The new versions are sanitized, homogenized, and much more expensive. Streets that still bear the names of the artisans who used to live and work there are now filled with tourists, and all the shops are fashion stores, trendy restaurants, venders of novelty trinkets imported from sweatshops in the Global South. Cops are everywhere-sometimes you can see them chasing the undocumented people who sell sunglasses near the beach. And recently the government has introduced laws of "civism," puritanical measures rarely seen this side of the pond including restrictions on playing music or drinking in the streets (you can bet the latter are never enforced against the bar-hopping American college students who rattle windows nightly with their loud voices and drunken brawls). Rents are going through the roof as the city turns itself into a museum for the tourists. Really, it's economic terrorism. And while locals are forced out to the suburbs or even onto the streets, speculators hold on to 150,000 vacant houses throughout the metropolitan area, waiting for the prices to go up. After decades of control by the rightwing nationalist party, Barcelona has recently come under a coalition led by the socialists, and the gentrification has only accelerated.

In response to this situation, the squatters' movement uses direct action. There is a need for housing, and plenty of vacant, deteriorating buildings, so they occupy them, and fix them up. Poor people and undocumented people often squat clandestinely on an individual basis, and the movement is an organized, open version of this. Instead of trying to keep the squat a secret, they throw out a banner, clean the building up, and organize to defend their new homes. Many of the occupied houses are turned into social centers that are foundations for a much broader anarchist or autonomous movement. They also become focal points for the community struggle against gentrification. The collectives of the occupied social centers build relations with neighbors, protest together against speculation and the rising rents. The squatters provide a radical example of a solution to gentrification, and having freed themselves from wage slavery they can throw themselves into organizing, while at the more successful social centers, the neighbors support the squatters, making the authorities hesitant to evict them.

Here as everywhere else, it is a war of two different visions of society. The property owners, the politicians, and the cops who throw about the word "terrorism" are certainly terrified by the vision of a world in which everybody has housing, people don't need to scramble for wages just to honor someone else's concept of ownership; instead they organize with neighbors to meet their needs, they make their own plays and concerts and libraries in the social centers on every block rather than buying entertainment from the specialists who produce it; a world in which people don't have mind-numbing jobs they need to take vacations from, boring lives that chase them to exotic places as tourists to purchase some illusion of diversity and novelty; a world without borders, without documents, without immigrants having to run from the police, a world where people can travel and change experiences freely, unhindered by the filters set up by the authorities to control and profit off the myriad movement of life.

To repress this vision, the authorities clearly have recourse to terrorist measures, and there is another kind of terrorism as well in the quotidian reality of poverty and consumption. But fortunately, people struggling for another world are answering the repression with solidarity. Amazingly, after just a few days, the struggling, broke collectives of Barcelona were able to raise the 30,000 euros and get me out of Modelo, back on the streets. I am required to sign in at court every two weeks until trial, meaning I have to stay in Spain, perhaps for the next couple years. It's not such a bad place, and the social movements here have struck me with their beauty and resilience. In the meantime, I walk the battleground streets and familiarize myself with the city that must become my home. I try to avoid the crowds but often I find myself surrounded by tourists, unknowingly waging an unseen war, with their dollars as weapons. I want to direct their eyes to the levels above the ground floor Irish pubs they are seeking, to the bricked over windows of the vacant apartments, and there-right there, on the third floor, the mortar has been carefully chipped out to provide a breathing hole, just a few centimenters long, the only sign of a clandestine existence. I want to put them on the other side, looking out through the hole, and I want them to feel the terror that comes with the sight of the police, the police who might evict them, the police who make the tourists feel so safe, the police who torture political prisoners, chase immigrants, and protect property rights.

It's an easy road from tourism to terrorism. If these tourists aren't careful, they might wander too close to a protest, they might be framed for a public disorder that never happened. If these tourists aren't careful, their eyes might stray from the official attractions, they might read the writing on the wall the sanitation crews are quickly scrubbing away. They might learn to see through the cracks in the wall between this world and another one.

Peter Gelderloos is an activist and author from Virginia. Whenever he is allowed to be in the good ole US, he is active supporting prisoners and participating in the movement for prison abolition. He works with groups such as Copwatch, Anarchist Black Cross, Food Not Bombs, and the local infoshop. He has written a number of articles and pamphlets, and two books, How Nonviolence Protects the State, and Consensus: A New Handbook for Political, Environmental, and Social Groups. He is currently stuck in Spain awaiting trial. Anyone interested in giving solidarity in this or the other political cases can contact shigmagism [at] yahoo [dot] com

quote:

But Redwood, I still think that you're right and that the language is important and specially in cases like this we need to be very careful about the words that we use and how they are interpreted, because some words can be very inflamatory and provoke very strong and emotional reactions, not to mention have legal consequences.

Thank you for understanding Lena. I see it on TV all the time the way that questions are asked in order to get an inflammatory response. We have actually lost the art of rhetoric and not getting emotionally attached to a topic. When MapMan comes in with his findings, it should be interesting to get another perosn's point of view on the aituation.

Shawn

Hey Phil,

I've asked around about your situation and this is what was explained to me:

The police have the right to conduct a redada (raid) on a bar as long as they have a orden judicial (equivalent to a warrant). If a place is raided, then anyone on the premises is subject to a search.

So, for example if you were in a bar that was being monitored for drug trafficking (and apparently a few places in Malasaña are) and you were there the night that the police conducted the raid, you are subject to a search. It's a question of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Granted, this did not come from a legal or law enforcement source. But there must be some ounce of truth to it. What my source did say was that the manhandling that you say you received was inappropriate and you should denounce the treatment at the local comisaria.

Also, remember that in Spain, the laws regarding citizen's privacy ARE different than in the USA. A person can be stopped on the street at any time and asked to show identification for no reason whatsoever.

Did you ever contact the US Embassy??

quote:

What my source did say was that the manhandling that you say you received was inappropriate and you should denounce the treatment at the local comisaria.

Thanks for this Becky. It's a start. We can discuss this topic until we are blue in the face, but now it's up to Phil to take action.

Shawn

Hey Phil,

Well, what's the outcome to it all?

We're still patiently sitting here and waiting the find out what you did about it, (if anything) and if in fact the cop(s) were out-of-order in the way that they treated you/dealt with you, and if there are going to be any repercussions for them!!

Please do give us some feedback on this, given the current environment in Spain, I think it might be a good idea to keep up to date on how us extranjeros are being treated here.

I haven't been hassled by cops in quite a while, but I did get some pretty nasty black looks in my direction just recently, while I have been visiting various places in & around Cantabria, two local guys I think, in two locations, one guy in particular, gave me some seriously long and bad-news kind of eyeball, and I'm not entirely sure if it was my mochila that I had on my back, or the camera that I was holding, or both perhaps, who knows, the guy was obviously a sick individual, so I moved on smartly, the first guy was just trying to be hostile & unfriendly, and generally trying to intimidate me into leaving the Bar, so I drank my coffee and left!!

It seems to me that there is a very shitty atmosphere here in Spain right now, all over Spain, and it's not just the cops who's got a problem either, it seems to be just about everybody, a lot of times I was having to ask for simple information, directions, etc, in quioscos, shops, Bus stations, Train stations, Estancos, you name it, yet the blatant reluctance to even give me an answer in most of those places, was just so obvious, they just didn't want to know, and some were just so damn rude about it, & were basically no help at all, I nearly missed some Busses & trains because of being given the wrong info, and on two occasions I did miss them, and had a problem or two, just because they clearly had no intention of giving me the correct info, and that was totally deliberate.

So as you can well imagine, you need to be on your toes here, as there is clearly a lot of resentment towards non natives being here in Spain, and many of the bad attitudes, ignorance & general bad manners & lack of concern that I have come across recently have confirmed to me that there is a more serious problem going on here.

Many natives (people born here, grown-up etc) feel as if they are being invaded by outsiders, and they really don't like it in a very big way, and to me it is starting to show in a very big way, so far this year, there is a lot of tension around, that and the double problem of having two types of terrorism to worry about in Spain, the Islamic threat, and that of ETA, everybody is both nervous, and agitated by it all, and then of course I sense a certain degree of anti Americanism in Spain right now, which doesn't help much, and I find many Spaniards are not particularly welcoming in any case, especially to expats (American and British) oh they love to take your money no doubt, but take a closer look at the poison hiding behind that false smile!!

Anyway, I hope you did make some inquiries at the Embassy, cos if you let it go, it might well happen again to other less experienced expats, who may be new to the game here, so we'll wait to hear back from you on it.

Saludos

quote:

I am sick as a dog right now and possibly have carpal tunnel to boot, so I am going to take a break before posting and answering any requests for a few days...

I think that's it's going to be a while before we hear anything about this since the above quote was written on May 24, 2007.

Shawn

That may be a fact, Shawn, but it seems to be a little irrelevant to me, as I think that a response is pending, even if just to tell us if he did bother with it, or he didn't, one way or the other, with or without an explanation as to why he cheesed out, if that is in fact what he has done. I tend to think that, if he had already contacted the embassy about it, we surely would have heard back from him by now, so it doesn't look like as if he did.

Que pena!!

Hey guys.

Sorry for the late response..I have cut down on non-work related internet use in general to give my hands a break.

I never contacted the embassy. I talked to a lawyer friend who said yes the cops can stop and search you.

I do not have 30 seconds free due to the new launch of the magazine. once we get rocking you can expect a feature on this. Sorry for the wait!

Phil

Just for the record:
The Guardia Civil way out here on the perimeter are evidently bored out of their skulls and taking full advantage of their right to check IDs. They set up checkpoints on particularly "busy" stretches of 2-lane, pull over anyone who looks vaguely interesting, (aka foreign-looking people and women with blond hair) and look over all the paperwork in the glovebox.
Then they look inside all the windows, and ask where I've been today and where I am going, why my husband is not with me in the car (or in one case Why was I driving and not him!) and why we bought this kind of car. (It's a Renault Kangoo furgoneta...not exactly a babe-magnet, but evidently the vehicle of choice for car-bombers intent on blowing up the chicken farms of the Tierra de Campos.)

I would not complain but I have been pulled over THREE TIMES in the last four months, and also flagged down on a hiking trail and told to keep my dog within 20 meters of me at all times. Way out in the middle of the cornfields. No one's come near my privates, but I am beginning to feel harrassed.

Rebekah
once from Toledo, now from Palencia