The Christmas security measures in Palma will begin on the 1st of December and end on the 8th of January. The ‘Safe Commerce Plan’ aims to prevent theft during the Christmas campaign and will have a 420-strong force.
The National Police has explained at the headquarters of the Federació de la Petita i Mitjana Empresa de Mallorca (PIMEM) the security device that will begin on 1 December and end on 8 January with 420 troops only for Palma. The police force has explained that the plan began to be drawn up in mid-November, when the first contacts were made with employers’ organisations and associations, basically with two objectives in mind.
The first is to disseminate information on the safe commerce plan, which has been made available to employers and associations in printed and electronic material.
The second objective is to collaborate, coordinate and gather as much useful information as possible in order to be able to act as quickly and efficiently as possible. Regarding this second objective, Federico Chacón, head of the national police’s area of citizen participation, assures us that “it is about making shopkeepers participants in their own security and that they can collaborate with us as much as possible”.
‘Safe commerce plan’ in Palma to fight against Christmas robberies
The operational phase of the retail security plan is coordinated not only by the local police of Palma, but also by all the private security contracted by the shopping centres, who are also professionals who provide valuable information to the police forces. The head of the Provincial Citizen Security Brigade, Fernando Corchero, recalled that “the security plan is framed within level 4 of the anti-terrorist plan, and this means that the operations are carried out in places where there is a concentration of people, such as shopping areas or in commercial time slots, in short, that the police presence is visible, which we know gives people peace of mind”.
With regard to the number and type of crimes, the figures have not changed over the years and, without going into numbers obtained from internal police statistics, Corchero pointed out that “crimes simply change depending on the time of year and the place”. With regard to the upturns that may occur at certain times of the year, the officer recalled that the Christmas festivities are a time of the year when the number of robberies in Palma increases, but in contrast, at this time of the year there is hardly any activity in Playa de Palma. When asked if this causes saturation of the police force, Corchero reminded the police that “the devices are limited, but they have excellent collaboration with the local police, increasing their effectiveness in making Palma a safer city”.
For his part, the vice-president of PIMEM, Miquel Àngel Salvà, said that one of the main challenges facing shopkeepers is to speed up the complaints ‘in situ’ as much as possible and thus avoid the temporary delay, “a fact that sometimes discourages shopkeepers from filing the corresponding complaint”. In this sense Federico Chacón, head of the area of citizen participation of the national police, recalled that to speed up the complaints you can use the virtual official and once inside the website of the national police; www.policia.es.
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