The Justice has confirmed a 15-day suspension imposed on the National Police sub-inspector Alfredo Perdiguero for harassing and threatening a resident of the Madrid neighborhood of Lavapiés while he was participating in a live show on the far-right YouTube channel Estado de Alarma. The judges reject the appeal filed by the police officer, Vox’s candidate in several Madrid elections, and strongly reproach him for his attitude towards a citizen. “The video itself makes clear the threatening attitude and the absolute lack of consideration and respect of the appellant towards the citizen,” says the contentious chamber of the Superior Court of Justice of the capital in a sentence, to which elDiario has had access. .es, which confirms a new sanction for serious misconduct for this national police officer, which already adds several similar punishments.
The video was broadcast on September 15, 2020 on the YouTube channel Estado de Alarma and has accumulated more than 20,000 views to date. In it Perdiguero, without uniform but constantly identified as a member of the National Police, walks through the Lavapiés neighborhood with the aim of documenting a supposed decline in the area that he attributes, above all, to the presence of immigrants. While it is being recorded, a neighbor in the area reproaches them and that is when Perdiguero threatens to arrest and sanction him while a headline titles the episode ‘Patrolling Lavapiés’.
“In the end I identify you, I propose you for a sanction for not wearing a mask and I send you ahead, are you very clear about it?” Says the policeman as he approaches his index finger a few centimeters from his face. “Do not insult me for what may happen to you, be very careful with what you are doing,” he threatens later.
The General Directorate of the Police analyzed the video and decided to impose a sanction of 15 days of suspension of functions for a serious lack of “disconsideration with the citizens when it causes notorious discredit to the police institution.” A sanction that the sub-inspector appealed and that was confirmed in May by the Superior Court of Justice of Madrid, in an appealable sentence before the Supreme Court. The police officer denounced irregularities in the sanction process but also that when he confronted the citizen he did so in a private capacity and not as a police officer, finally alleging that the sanction violated his freedom of expression and union freedom. The Prosecutor’s Office and the State Attorney’s Office requested confirmation of the sanction.
The judges have no doubt that the sanction has been correctly imposed. They criticize the “threatening attitude and the absolute lack of consideration and respect” of the agent with the citizen. His attitude, add the judges, was “seriously inconsiderate” and in no way acted as a citizen, but as a policeman. “He threatens to identify him, something that a citizen cannot do to another citizen, but rather a police officer on duty”, highlights the sentence.
The video itself makes clear the appellant’s threatening attitude and absolute lack of consideration and respect for the citizen in question, who, due to his accent, is undoubtedly a foreigner, possibly of North African origin. The fact that the reason for recording the video was to try to show that urban coexistence and the life of citizens in the Lavapiés neighborhood has worsened in recent years as a result of immigration, must also be taken into account when assessing the lack of consideration of the sanctioned police officer towards the citizen who criticized them for what they were doing.
For the TSJM, this “lack of respect and consideration towards citizens of North African origin” as well as “the threatening nature of Perdiguero’s gestures and tone of voice” are “clear and obvious” elements that, according to the judges, “constitute a clear infringement of the duties of the members of the State Security Forces and Corps”. Harassing a citizen and threatening to send him to the police station are attitudes that, according to the judgment, “are in no way compatible with the image and behavior that a member of the National Police Force must offer both in his public and private performance, at the same time that are manifestly incompatible with the duty of faithful performance of their position and function”.
The judges of the TSJ of Madrid also reject that this confrontation with a resident of Lavapiés took place in the private sphere of Perdiguero. He was not on duty, acknowledges the sentence, but “his status as an official of the National Police Corps was not unrelated”, as he was identified at all times as a member of the National Police in the video on Javier Negre’s channel. “He clearly allows public use of his status as an official of the National Police Corps and that his professional category and the official shield and logo be used,” the judges reproached.
“An official of the National Police Corps is obliged to observe conduct of the utmost decorum,” adds the sentence, not only in uniform but also “in the acts of his life in society” and his attitude in this program caused “notorious damage to the police institution. The judges also reject, finally, any irregularity in their sanction process. Everything was “processed with absolute correctness”, explains the sentence. Perdiguero, settle the judges, “behaved publicly with serious disregard for a citizen.”
As has happened on other occasions, Perdiguero tried to rely on his status as spokesperson for a union to avoid this sanction, but the judges explain that at no time in the video did he act as such. “At no time did he make claims related to the welfare of the members of the Police Institution or about the working conditions” of the policemen, he explains, in a video that was limited to blaming migrants for an alleged degradation of Lavapiés.
Alfredo Perdiguero is a member of the National Police with great media exposure in the last decade, both for his union activity and for his interventions in the media, as well as his political activity in the hands of the far-right Vox party. Perdiguero participated in two regional elections to the Community of Madrid on the lists of Santiago Abascal’s party, although he failed on both occasions in his attempt to obtain a seat in the Vallecas Assembly. He was fifth in the far-right lists in 2015 and 16th in 2019.
Throughout his career he has been a spokesperson for police unions such as the Federal Police Union, the Spanish Independent Police Union, the Independent Police Movement and currently the Police Union Alternative. His appearance in the media and his activity on various social networks with a twitter profile who accumulates more than 49,000 followers has left numerous statements, for example, linking crime with immigration and with unaccompanied minors, questioning false accusation figures of sexist violence or against feminism. He has also fueled several hoaxes about the pandemic and released, among other things, audios of the then minor victim of the ‘Arandina case’.
This sanction for intimidating a resident of Lavapiés is not the first that the judges have confirmed for this sub-inspector of the National Police. As elDiario.es revealed this January, the TSJM itself endorsed a two-month sanction imposed on Perdiguero for broadcasting on Canal Sur, the Andalusian public television, that the Government Delegation in Madrid had ordered to prohibit the participants of a demonstration in 2020 will carry the Spanish flag.
In recent years he has also been reprimanded by the National Police Disciplinary Regime Unit for broadcasting a video of packages of sheets but implying that it was medical material transferred to France in the worst of the first wave, for calling “the one of the bun” to then Vice President Pablo Iglesias and insulting the also multi-file policeman Alejandro ‘Jandro Lion’ León. The latter, as this newspaper has revealed, is another police officer close to Vox who has been sanctioned, precisely, for asking for the vote for the far-right formation in one of his videos.
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