Inaccuracies about crime, insecurity and economic growth: the 'fact-checks' of Jordi Wild's interviews with Colau, Feijóo and Sánchez

Jordi Wild had two journalists to verify the interviews with three of the four main candidates for the elections on November 29 on his podcast, The Wild Project. They did not intervene on five occasions during the up to six hours of conversation with Ada Colau (Frente Amplio), Alberto Núñez Feijóo (PP) and Pedro Sánchez (PSOE). The Verificat team has detected up to 49 verifiable claims.

In a first analysis, eight of the 12 statements of the Frente Amplio candidate were true, seven of the 11 of the popular leader, and 19 of the head of the socialist list. Verificat has qualified five dubious statements. The rest are in the process of verification or have already been denied on previous occasions.

The first of the dialogues published on Jordi Wild's YouTube channel was that of the Frente Amplio candidate, Ada Colau. During the talk, the former mayor of Barcelona spoke about her time at the head of the Barcelona council and declared that she increased the staff of the city's Urban Guard "as has not been done for a long time", stating that the increase amounted to thousands of agents. It's misleading.

The city's local police force added 330 agents during Colau's two terms (2015-2023), according to data obtained by Verificat in 2023, going from 3,018 to 3,348 agents.

Although it is true that, in that period, the council called for up to 1,494 police positions, the figure includes both the replacements of people retired or retired from the force for other reasons, as well as those of new creation.

Asked about the perception of insecurity in the city, the candidate defended her management and considered that the figures were “more or less stable” throughout her mandate, pointing out that “robberies are the bulk of crimes” in Barcelona.

What does the data say? During the first of Colau's two terms, the crime rate rose by 20%, coinciding with an upward trend in Catalonia as a whole. The growth is explained, in part, by an increase in thefts. At the end of her second term, marked by covid-19, the former mayor left the city council with a rate slightly higher than that of 2015, but lower than that of 2019.

The number one of the Popular Party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, assured this Friday before Jordi Wild that there are "half a million immigrants who earn the minimum vital income without having worked a single hour in the last year." This is unverifiable data.

According to IMV statistics from last October, there are 911,274 holders of the benefit, of which 157,000 are foreigners, 17.3%. However, the available data only details the nationality of the benefit holder, but not their cohabitation unit, which may also be a beneficiary. Thus, it is not possible to know how many foreign beneficiaries there are among the adults who are not beneficiaries of the benefit, nor their employment status.

For his part, also in immigration matters, the head of the PSOE list, Pedro Sánchez, has indicated that “of the migrants who come to us [to Spain], 40% are European, the other 40% are Latin American and the rest are either African or Asian.” They are misleading figures.

Although it is true that the people who arrived in Spain between 2021 and 2024 came between 40% and 50% from Latin America, those who came from Europe did not reach 30%, according to the INE Migration and Changes of Residence Statistics. This is almost 10 points less than what the socialist candidate has defended. If we look at the data year by year, 2021 was the period in which the most people came from Europe, 33.5%, a proportion that has reduced to 23.6% in 2024.