In early February, “Parad de Pararme” was staged in Lavapies’ Teatro del Barrio as a dramatic recreation of first-person accounts of police profiling. Fruit baskets hanging on a wall served as a backdrop, with each basket containing individual stories of harassment. Afro-Cuban actor Malcolm McCarthy read the accounts aloud, narrating the incidents:
“Resting on a bench in the square while looking at the pigeons, a policeman stopped me” because he had an order to identify “people that look like me.”
Another man, wearing a tracksuit, is also stopped and questioned. A third man, late for work, tells of running for a bus only to be chased by police officers.
“Parad de Pararme,” which translates to “Stop Stopping Me,” was co-produced by the NGO SOS Racisme Catalunya to reveal the intensity of police profiling in Black communities in Spain.
“This issue is so easily dismissed in Spain,” said co-director Carolina Torres Topaga in Spanish. “Police get away with it because they say it’s part of their job but only those in the community know the real effects which is why we made this show.”
In 2018, the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) 5th review recommended that the Spanish government “collect and publish data on acts of racial discrimination.” However, the government argued that “the collection and dissemination of this information would violate the law” despite many attempts to make this data available.
Instead, SOS Racisme reached out to various communities and asked residents to document cases of police profiling. These “testimonies” became the backbone of the movement leading to the creation of the show. The organization wants “to create a rigorous report that measures this injustice and allows us to influence police protocols and offer legal advice.”
The national government keeps no official statistics on how ethnicity plays a role in who police stop and question SOS Racisme Catalunya created their own movement under the same name as the play to spotlight the police profiling and to “denormalize and make it visible,” according to their mission statement.
The show debuted on February 4 at Lavapies’ Teatro del Barrio, which has hosted many other shows “to promote social debate.” Lavapies is a migrant community where residents have been routinely stopped for no apparent reason by police for decades, said Antumi Toasije, president of Spain’s Council to Eliminate Racial and Ethnic Discrimination. “Under the guise of controlling drug use the local police increased patrolling the neighborhood. They use whatever excuses they can to stay in the area, disturbing the community constantly.”
Yet the Ministry of the Interior reported in 2014, more than 74% of the people identified have not committed any crime.
“It’s been a fight the community has been forced to take up arms against for too long. It's honestly hard to see an end in sight but productions like “Parad de Pararme” can definitely help,” said Toasije.
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