Ada Colau asked Jordi Wild to identify the source of a figure during their appearance on The Wild Project. His team checked it live and confirmed that foreign nationals accounted for 4,942 of the 5,442 people detained for theft in Barcelona in 2024.
El Mundo published the figures in 2025, citing data from the Directorate-General of Police of the Generalitat, supplied in response to a Vox information request. Of the 5,442 people detained for theft (*hurto*), 4,942 were foreign nationals and 500 were Spanish nationals. The foreign-national share was 90.8%, rounded to 91%. These figures count detentions, not incidents or convictions, and may include repeat individuals. Maldita.es rated the claim true in May 2025 after checking the figures with the Mossos d'Esquadra.
Colau accepted the 2024 figure but said the records she saw as mayor showed a different pattern. In the first half of 2022, foreign nationals made up 76% of the 2,939 people detained by the Guardia Urbana: 2,247 people, according to the police force’s response to Valents. That figure covers one police force and a six-month period, while the 2024 count concerns Barcelona-wide theft detentions over a full year, so the two totals are not directly comparable. Arrests do not represent every offence, and the Mossos do not routinely publish the nationality of people arrested. The same Generalitat data separately recorded 3,595 foreign nationals and 709 Spanish nationals detained for robbery involving violence or intimidation in 2024. That is a separate offence category, not part of the theft total. A separate account of policing during a strike described an incident in Madrid.
Colau also said that men accounted for 90% of all crimes during her years as mayor. Separately, men made up 80% of people registered as convicted in Spain in 2025, according to the INE. The figures measure different things: Barcelona’s detention data concerns nationality in specific offence categories, while the INE figure concerns convictions by sex.
