As holiday season looms, Spanish police are set to crackdown on those hotspots famed for drunk lairy people from the UK destroying everything with their WKD-coloured vom. Ibiza is the first confirmed placethat'll see British police brought over to tackle the drunken onslaught, and there are negotiations currently happening for other places - including Magaluf.
The Guardia Civil in the Balearics reportedly asked the British police to help provide increased security earlier this year, which is a pretty big deal; while UK police have travelled abroad in the past to monitor football hooligans, they're not usually deployed to look after tourists. But apparently it's got so bad that the Spanish police can no longer cope. It's true that, over the last few years Ibiza has suffered from a fair few high profile drug-related incidents, including a huge raid of the largest gang of British drugs traffickers on the island in 2011. Around 3,600 ecstasy pills were seized, along with five kilograms of MDMA and four kilograms of cocaine.
Drink related issues are a constant problem; in 2012, the Foreign Office said a lot of the arrests involving UK holidaymakers were due to people being battered in places including Ibiza, Majorca and the Costa del Sol. So it's sort of not surprising that they need to up the ante when it comes to cracking down on those who are partying way too hard.
'They are police officers who knows the language and the idiosyncrasy of their compatriots,' said a Balearics-based government spokesperson. The mayor of San Antonio added: 'Hotel bosses have already offered these police free rooms. The arrival of these officers, who will patrol with Civil Guard officers, will increase the security we want to offer both tourists and residents.It will also help local Spanish police concentrate on making sure by-laws like bar opening hours are adhered to so they don't find themselves overwhelmed by public order interventions.'
It comes after Majorca saw some success when they called on French and German police to help out with drunk holidaymakers last year, and also rides on the wave of the recent clampdown in Magaluf that sees street-drinking banned between 10pm and 8am. Police are even able to confiscate soft drinks, and soon shops won't be able to sell alcohol between midnight and 8am, so it seems that the war against dangerously boozy holidays has certainly ramped up a notch. One thing's for sure, we don't envy the police being called abroad to help out.
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Picture: Ivo Schwalbe
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.