After being suddenly sacked overnight by the Spanish government, the chief of Catalonia's Mossos d'Esquadra police force, Josep Lluís Trapero, sent a message this morning to all officers in the force. "This is not an easy day for me and I ask for your understanding if my words do not satisfy you fully, or if you find any omission or lack of consideration in them", begins the letter, to which El Nacional has had access. "You have to continue writing the future", he tells his police officers.
Despite a "sadness" which Josep Lluís Trapero admits, the former police chief says that this is "absolutely outweighed by the pleasure and satisfaction" in the work carried out over the last few years. "You have worked with bravery, often facing demands going beyond the normal expectations of public service, during years when resources where lacking, when funding cuts affected working conditions or we faced a lack of understanding of our actions at times", he asserts.
Trapero is convinced that the "incoming police command, after the nomination of Ferran López as new Mossos chief, will help "to continue writing the future". In spite of the fact that there is a "noise which surrounds all our actions", he believes that in the future this will not become "a conditioning factor in our daily routine", the same as up till now.
"The Mossos d'Esquadra are today a professional, modern, effective organization, with the constant ambition to excell in everything we do", declared the sacked police leader. He also apologised to agents "for demands made on them but not properly compensated, because the support given to officers did not always prevent them from suffering consequences and a lack of understanding" and to "those of you who I'm sure have had motives to consider yourselves forgotten or overlooked by the organization".
The letter concludes with the first words he addressed to them as head of the police force, in 2013, which now "take on meaning". In 2013 he said: "We are not the protagonists. The protagonists are an ordinary couple, and their two children, and the seven and a half million people who give meaning to our profession".