The senior prosecutor of the Canary Islands, María Farnés Martínez Frigola, assured this Friday that no relationship has been noted between the increase in crime and immigration.
“There are only four procedures in which an unaccompanied foreign minor is involved,” Martínez Frigola detailed during a committee appearance in the Parliament of the Canary Islands to present the report of the Prosecutor’s Office corresponding to 2023.
The juvenile centers are “very saturated,” which makes the work of educators difficult and leads to “more anger and fights, but nothing special,” said the senior prosecutor, who thanked the Government of the Canary Islands for its efforts. because no other autonomous community is in this situation.
According to the Prosecutor’s Office compilation, in 2023, 697 boats with 40,190 migrants arrived in the Canary Islands and 36 deaths, 143 arrests and 95 admissions to prison were recorded.
Most of the migrants were men (36,191), while 2,272 were women, 3,193 were minors whose age was determined by the tests and 2,084 were “undoubted” minors.
The large arrival of minors, mainly starting in August, led to a unit of specialists from the Civil Guard being moved to Tenerife to carry out age determination tests.
In the first half of the year, 236 age determination files were initiated in the province of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, but at the end of the year there were 2,410 in total, thanks to the fact that this special team of the Civil Guard carried out 1,300 tests in a month and a half .
In Las Palmas, 1,600 files were opened for age determination in 2023 and in the entire Canary Islands, 3,471 files in total.
María Farnés Martínez emphasized the lack of means to care for victims of domestic violence, especially in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, where women are often forced to withdraw their complaints due to a lack of support and the ability to know their alternatives and rights.
“If the victim protection offices do not function, they understand that the lesser evil is to withdraw the complaint and return to their aggressor, but it is for an economic issue,” denounced the prosecutor.
Martínez considered it striking that the crime that increases the most in terms of gender violence is the breach of sentence and precautionary measures, generated by a recovery of coexistence, when protection measures fail.
Regarding the evolution of procedures and crime, the prosecutor indicated that 149,285 criminal procedures were processed in 2023, with a decrease of 7.3% in the province of Las Palmas and an increase of 15.59% in Santa Cruz de Tenerife.
Compliance sentences increased to reach 98% of cases, said Martínez, and defended progress in the implementation of restorative justice or mediation as alternatives in conflict resolution.
Crimes against life and physical integrity increased in the province of Las Palmas in 2023, although intentional homicides decreased, unlike in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, where the latter went from 38 in 2022 to 60 in 2023.
In the civil sphere, the complaints of the Prosecutor’s Office include the delay and lack of quality in the psychosocial evaluation reports, the saturation of meeting points and the permanence of people with disabilities in hospitals despite having received medical discharge.
The report of the Prosecutor’s Office also reflects an increase in crimes related to the use of new technologies and sexist cyber violence, as well as an increase in proceedings in environmental crimes.
Regarding the infrastructure that the Prosecutor’s Office has, Martínez recalled that the facilities at the Santa Cruz de Tenerife headquarters present an urgent need for expansion to become similar to that of Las Palmas and be able to offer an equitable level of service.
The deficiencies in Tenerife limit the ability to increase the number of prosecutors and judicial bodies, which affects the quality of the administration of justice, he denounced.
There are also shortcomings in Puerto del Rosario, where the situation is critical: the headquarters does not have ventilation, air conditioning and, sometimes, sewage floods occur, which prevents its expansion and forces prosecutors to work from their homes. .
In San Bartolomé de Tirajana, prosecutors have had to be transferred to the City of Justice of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria due to lack of space.
The situation is such at that headquarters that a reinforcement official has been resigned because there was nowhere to place him.