Finally fears were realized and nearly 150 officers from the local Seville Police were on duty on Saturday afternoon thanks to special Christmas programming, coinciding with the lighting of artistic illumination for around 300 people. … streets; No. 113 would have been absent even though Level 1 of the local emergency plan was in effect It forced them to take up this service, whose membership had previously been voluntary, according to municipal sources.
In this way, lNearly 75 percent of employees scheduled to work in the afternoon did not show up for dutyother agents were called in to make up for the shortage of personnel, in this conflict derived from the disagreement between the local government led by the popular José Luis Sanz and the local police corps unions, on the Christmas security plan, the backbone of The productivity that employees will be charged for additional hours of work performed For special devices.
previously, Of the 115 soldiers assigned to the morning shift on Saturday, 77 did not join And finally, to this service, specifically 71 regular police officers and six officers, a situation that could have been caused mainly by the agents assigned to this shift as an exceptional reinforcement thanks to the emergency plan, as well as other members of the force to whom this shift already corresponds.
This is after the city council activated the first level of its emergency plan Commitment of local police officers to take on special shifts and be available at any time to cover exceptional Christmas operations.
According to Seville City Council, agents who did not complete their allotted shift did so Obligation to officially prove medical leave, otherwise they will face the opening of a disciplinary filewith all its consequences.
From the local police union organizations, specifically the CSIF, it was defended that although the headquarters published last Friday a list of agents obligatorily assigned to the shift, this measure did not “personally decree” each of the agents concerned, warning that the order of the local police corps where the list of said forces was published It can only be accessed through City Hall computersWhich, according to this union force, “did not provide an effective mechanism” for communicating with these officials, in the case of those who were not active the previous day.
CSIF points out in this regard that although the local government activates the first level of the City Emergency Plan by decree, through which agents are obliged to cover these special services compared to the voluntary nature of the traditional Christmas Plan, in practice “There is no real emergency or disaster.”Under the pretext that agents went on their own initiative to cover unusual operations in times of emergency such as Storm Bernard in October 2023 or the last days of heavy rain.
for now, The Seville City Council has not specified the total bill to be paid for these additional hours to the local policewhich will never exceed the 5.6 million reported in the municipal government’s latest offer to the unions, which demanded at least a repeat of the planning for the previous Christmas, which cost around ten million euros.
“It is not a question of political will, but of the legal limits set for us to intervene,” the city’s mayor, José Luis Sanz, recently warned, repeating: “Not even the mayor is above the law», because it also affects that in May the 17 million euros allocated for overtime for agents have already been exhausted, in a context in which the structural deficit of active staff and the increasing number of large events in the city combine with the necessary preventive deployments.
However, before resorting to the decree route to activate the first level of the emergency plan, agents were imposed on special Christmas shifts; The local government of José Luis Sanz faltered The Forces Union of Local Police Employees rejected their offer of €5.6 millionUnder the pretext that this means fragmenting exceptional services to focus them on certain days of this period when the emergency affects the entire celebrations, according to the unions, which also claimed that there were difficulties in conciliation.
Moreover, the opposition forces, namely the Socialist Workers’ Party, Vox and Podemos IU, last Wednesday, without going any further, voted collectively in the plenary session against the €5.6 million budget amendment promoted by the local Popular Party government specifically to finance the overtime payment of agents during these holidays. Thus, it places itself on the side of the union’s rejection of the municipal plan.
During the general debate, the People’s Party appealed The “responsibility” of the opposition parties so that the “problem of insecurity” does not arise. In the city during the Christmas holidays, but they accused the Sanz municipal government of an alleged lack of dialogue, not implementing planning in a timely manner and trying to impose a plan that is considered a “correction”, in their opinion.
This is the scenario that finally led to the activation of the first level of the emergency plan as a last resort, to force agents to undergo special Christmas shifts, an unprecedented measure in municipal life and this is only at the beginning of its implementation. A state of collective absence, which its heroes will now have to justify.