The Canary Islands have reached the highest number of National Police and Civil Guard personnel since 2007, registering 7,945 agents of the State Security Forces and Corps in the Archipelago, 3,695 civil guards and 4,250 police.
According to the data of the Ministry of the Interior of September 2023, the latest available, the presence of the Civil Guard in the Canary Islands has increased by 9.4% in number of troops since 2016, while the National Police has increased the number of its agents in the islands by 15.4%.
“This increase is part of the Spanish Government’s commitment to security and to recover the workforce that had been lost until 2018. In fact, at the state level, the successive offers of public employment convened by the Ministry of the Interior have allowed a progressive recovery of the number of agents to reverse the 13,077 places that were lost in the period 2012-2017,” says the Government delegate, Anselmo Pestana.
“We have reinforced the increase in Civil Guard and Police personnel in the islands through a replacement rate of 125 percent. In fact, the Security Forces and Corps are the group of state public employees to which a higher rate of replacement has been applied. We cannot say that we have neglected security in the last five years, nor can we say that we are not concerned that the citizens demand a greater police presence to increase their sense of security,” he adds.
In this regard, Anselmo Pestana points out that, in areas such as the Aridane Valley in La Palma, where there have been recent complaints about a reduction in the sense of security on the part of some neighbors, the Civil Guard troops are above 100 percent of the catalog of jobs, “which makes it the municipality with the highest employment rate in the Canary Islands.”
Crime rate
The crime rate in the Canary Islands, which is measured by criminal offenses per 1,000 inhabitants, was last September at 46.7 points, below the national average, registering the highest level of clarified criminal offenses of the entire historical series that began in 2012, of 49.4%, without taking into account 2020 and 2021, anomalous years due to the mobility restrictions caused by the health emergency of Covid19.
“These results in the Canary Islands are only the result of the efforts of a consolidated staff and of National Police and Civil Guard agents who work for and for the safety of citizens. In recent times this has also required a determined commitment on the part of the Ministry of the Interior in terms of human and technical resources for the prevention and investigation of cybercrime, particularly scams through the Internet,” explains the government delegate in the Canary Islands.
The Government Delegation in the Canary Islands reaffirms its commitment to the coordination of all Security Forces and Bodies, not only in citizen security, but also in collaboration with other priority lines such as the protection of victims of gender violence through the VioGén system, where local police officers are already actively involved.
In this regard, it is important that, in this work of police coordination, the municipal administrations accompany the increase in the endowments of State Security Forces and Bodies with the reinforcement of the Local Police staffs, to adapt to the population increase that has been registered in some municipalities.