The PSOE of Sant Antoni de Portmany (Ibiza) has made public a complaint against what it considers irregular practices of privatization of citizen security by the current government team of the City Council, by allowing private security personnel to patrol the municipality performing functions that, in their opinion, resemble those of the Local Police.
In a note sent to the media, the socialists accuse the mayor of having awarded a contract for 153,662 euros to a private security company in order to carry out rounds and presence in the streets for a period of three months.
"The reality is that private security agents have begun to patrol the streets as if they were Local Police agents," they have stated.
For the PSOE, this hiring "represents a clear invasion of the functions that legislation exclusively attributes to the security forces."
According to the official announcement from the City Council, the object of the contract is the provision of "services of discontinuous rounds carried out by private security in public spaces."
The socialist party argues that resorting to the "excuse" of these foot movements between municipal offices to, in practice, establish continuous patrols throughout the urban area "constitutes an irregular practice to try to cover the shortcomings of the police staff," and accuses the PP of diverting public funds towards the privatization of a service considered essential.
In light of this situation, the Municipal Socialist Group of Sant Antoni demands that this decision be reversed and that the privatization of security be put to an end, allocating municipal resources to cover the vacant positions in the Local Police and ensuring that the surveillance of public roads falls exclusively on agents of the authority, as current regulations dictate.