Catalans ran 500 Spanish national police out of town after widespread brutality reports

(Image credit: Getty Images)

published 3 October 2017

Angry over widespread police brutality during Sunday's independence referendum, Catalans drove about 500 police officers working for Spain's central government in Madrid out of their hotel rooms in Barcelona on Monday night. In at least one case, a hotel owner decided he would no longer host the cops because of their conduct.

These police are a small fraction of the 16,000 law enforcement officers Madrid sent to Catalonia to forcibly suppress the autonomous region's vote. Their aggressive tactics, including use of batons and rubber bullets on would-be voters, left 900 Catalans injured.

Local Catalan police promised Madrid in advance they would shut down polling places themselves, but on the day of the vote, they declined to intervene. Patrol cars were out and about Sunday, Bloomberg reports, but "didn't seal off polling stations and ballot organizers cheered as they drove past." The most probable explanation is their sympathies lie with the 90 percent of voters in Sunday's referendum who support an independent Catalonia.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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