“Can Interior confirm if there isand Civil Guard personnel without individually assigned vestsindicating the number of troops affected, units and cause? What deadline does the ministry set to guarantee 100% individual provision and what budget is allocated to it?” For the umpteenth time, the ministry led by Fernando Grande-Marlaska is forced to answer these questions. The reason? Its “distortion” of reality and the ignoring of the agents who, time and again, have denounced the lack of bulletproof vests for individual use.
At the request of the PP, the Executive responded to these questions in the Congress of Deputies, comparing the current situation with the one inherited in 2018 (with Rajoy in the Government). Then, the vests were “insufficient and a large number of the existing ones were expired or defective.” In its parliamentary response, the Ministry of the Interior denied the civil guards and claimed “to have acquired, received and distributed since 2028 a significant number of bulletproof, knife-proof and puncture-proof vests: 68,198 units in the National Police and 69,370 in the Civil Guard“.
What’s more, Grande-Marlaska’s ministry resorts to rhetoric to try to convince the audience. Thus, it states that “the allocation of equipment and material means is framed in the existing generic plans for the complex, which include the most relevant aspects from both the operational and logistical-budgetary points of view. The set of needs is subject to a exhaustive planning and analysis process in each case which concludes with the prioritization of all needs in response to the importance, entity or unexpected circumstances that, where appropriate, may occur, in order to avoid dysfunctions or imbalances between the various units.”
Forced to share bulletproof vests
Rhetoric that is lost along the way, since to this day, professional associations continue to denounce that “There are Civil Guard agents without bulletproof vests for individual use that they must share it, which means a serious protection deficit“.
Despite this, in its parliamentary response in the Senate, the Executive alleges that the acquisition of police materials for the State Security Forces and Corps, including bulletproof vests, is carried out “in a centralized manner for the entirety of each Police Force, subsequently distributed according to the prioritized needs of each of the functional and territorial units.” Specifically, they point out that in the General Directorate of the Civil Guard they have invested nearly 82 million euros in protective materials for agents from 2019 to this year.
“Almost 20 million have been for the acquisition of bulletproof veststo which we must add about 300,000 euros in anti-fragment vests and 800,000 more in anti-trauma vests. In addition, it should be noted that, for the first time, there are vests specifically adapted to the female anatomy,” they emphasize from Interior.
In short, in the face of criticism and complaints from the civil guards, the Government sticks out its chest and boasts of an “increase in material resources.” In data (according to the Executive): The Civil Guard would have more than 61,000 bulletproof vests in the set of commands that constitute the territorial deployment of the Armed Institute, all of them within the period of their useful life. Although this figure is variable depending on acquisitions and disposals. In this way, the Interior settles the debate, with a nuance, by ensuring that all Civil Guard agents “whose mission requires this equipment” they have it.