Monte Paraiso - Security


	SECURITY
	Monteparaiso Security Bulletin No. 1

With regard to security the type of service which can be provided by the Civil Guard and that which the Local Police from the Town Hall is prepared to offer us were clearly defined. It was confirmed that the level of intervention by the Civil Guard in our urbanisation, compared to other areas in the municipality, was very high, with a daily patrol and close contact with the security company hired by Sitio de Calahonda CUE for our urbanisation, CPV Carman, S.A. Thus we can consider ourselves lucky, particularly bearing in mind that the Civil Guard do not have a large force for the size of the municipality and that the number of Guards and posts is being reduced every year.

With respect to the Local Police, their number is very limited and there are no plans for increasing the force to be able to attend to the urbanisations in general and Sitio de Calahonda in particular. We must take into account that the Mijas Municipal Police are employees of the Town Hall who pay their wages and therefore the decisions on priorities depend directly on the Town Hall,( the Mayor and the councillors). On many occasions we have asked the councillor in charge of the Police and the Mayor himself for greater police presence in our urbanisation and the reply is always the same; there are not even sufficient policemen to attend to the calls from the people in Mijas pueblo.

For these reasons, since the creation of the urbanization we have chosen to have private security, which has certain competencies and duties which we shall attempt to define. Spain has a code of legislation and therefore police action must be within a legal frame work without restricting the individual rights of its citizens and therefore no-one can be detained on the presumption that they are going to commit a crime, nor can anyone be considered as a delinquent until they have been tried and condemned by a judge. If the police are subject to this control, then the security guards are even more strictly controlled. They cannot detain anyone, nor can they search people, ask for documentation or remove vehicles. The most they can do in the event of finding someone who is committing a crime is to hold the individual until the Police arrive.

The presence of the security guards on our streets dissuades delinquents from trying to steal or vandalise in Sitio de Calahonda. They are there to prevent any criminal act, to help people when required and to watch over the common assets of the urbanisation, preventing acts of vandalism and watching out for problems with street lighting, heavy vehicles, water supply pipes, and traffic control. The guards' duties do not include access to private properties to resolve problems between neighbours or to enforce timetables for the swimming pools, however this does not mean that they will not attend to a call for assistance within a sub-community or home. Nevertheless it must be remembered that there are over one hundred sub-communities and only two guards 24 hours a day and an additional guard for twelve hours. On some occasions complaints are received that the guards do not cover the larger communities in the way they would like, however almost daily we can read in their reports that they have gone to calls from these communities.

The rules for the guards cover the control of fires, the prevention of robberies, the control of persons who enter our urbanisation with the intention of committing robberies, the control of small groups of vandals and delinquents, all covered in a system which divides the urbanisation into areas allowing the guard to get to know the people who normally frequent his area.

At present we have two cars 24 hours a day, one sent by the company to guard their alarms (thus this vehicle and guard is not paid by the urbanisation), and the other car 12 hours a day. An urbanisation with an estimated population of 15,000 people and more than 5,000 homes with a further 2,000 under construction needs more guards and we cannot expect this service to be offered by the Civil Guard or the Local Police and therefore we must make do with what we have, trying to improve the service and increase the number of guards.

The security of our homes starts with the measures which we take personally. We cannot expect that nothing will happen to us if we leave doors and windows open, if objects are left on show in cars, if we are not careful with our money and handbags and this is what we have been told by the Civil Guard since the majority of crimes concern theft due to distraction. In other cases robberies are reported falsely in order to claim from the insurance policy. We cannot deny that we have a security problem in common with the rest of the Costa del Sol and Spain and the rest of the world in general, but it is obvious that we must all combat this and not expect the guards or the police to be responsible for our own carelessness with our property or lack of attention in respect of the petty vandalism committed by our own children in the streets.