1 Barcelona the Beautiful
The crime was captured in real-time while a tourist was being interviewed by Spain’s TVE state broadcaster. While the interviewee was waxing lyrical about Barcelona’s “beautiful beach and clean, cold water,” the thief can be seen entering the shot in the background. He casually picks up the backpack and walks off with it. Soon afterward, the owner of the bag enters the shot and starts desperately searching for his property.
2 Busted!
Police were able to track down the criminal and bring him to justice, thanks to the live video which was posted online. “Thanks to a video published […] on social media and the victim’s complaint, today we identified and charged the perpetrator of a theft on Sant Miquel beach,” Barcelona’s Guàrdia Urbana police force said on Sunday. The stolen possessions were returned to their owner.
3 A Tourist Hotspot ae0fcc31ae342fd3a1346ebb1f342fcb
Barcelona has long been a popular tourist destination—the city gets around 27 million visitors a year pre-COVID. Locals in Barcelona haven’t always been happy with the influx of people taking over the city. “We’ve had a break from tourists for a year to think about how we want to deal with them,” says Xavier Marcé, Barcelona’s councilor for tourism and creative industries.
4 Barcelona Crimewave
This bag-snatching incident is sadly not unusual in Barcelona—the city has become a street crime hotspot, with approximately 225 thefts reported every day between January and the end of May 2022. 27 instances of violent theft were recorded in the same period. Even the Afghan ambassador to Spain was mugged earlier in August, when thieves took off with the diplomat’s watch. Deputy mayor and head of security, Albert Batlle announced a plan in May 2022 to attempt to deal with Barcelona’s notorious pickpockets. “We don’t want to spend this summer as though it’s a hopeless fate that we have to submit ourselves to, like one of the plagues of Egypt,” he said during a press conference.
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5 Smile, You’re On Camera
Thieves are increasingly finding themselves being recorded in these days of live social media broadcasts and phone cameras. A man in Shubra Al-Khaimah, Egypt unwittingly broadcast his face to 20,000 viewers after stealing a journalist’s phone during a livestream. He was found and arrested just a few hours later and taken to a police station where he made a full confession (although he could hardly deny it at that point). The moral of the story? There’s always someone watching.
