The Relevance of Medical Approach in the Analysis of the Police Violence During the Referendum of Self-Determination of Catalonia on October 1 st , 2017

On October 1 st , 2017, a non-authorized referendum on self-determination took place in Catalonia. The Spanish police forces carried out indiscriminate charges that injured numerous people. An official report from the Catalan Health Service stated that 1,066 people had been injured. The report was of an administrative nature and some aspects were not fully detailed. Moreover, the report didn’t make any kind of medical analysis. With the help of the Board of the College of Physicians of Barcelona, I obtained all the data of the injured people and carried out and published the study “Descriptive statistics of the people attended to by the Catalan Health Service as a consequence of the police charges on the day of the referendum on self-determination in Catalonia on October 1 st 2017”. The aim of the present Opinion Article was to publicize the main results of the study to the scientific community and highlight the importance of the medical approach in the assessment of police violence. When including all the details and their critical analysis the impact of the police violence on the civilian population was much more significant than previously thought. It was also assessed that the police had acted with great violence and viciousness, as the following data show:

On October 1 st , 2017, a non-authorized referendum on self-determination took place in Catalonia. The Spanish police forces carried out indiscriminate charges that injured numerous people. An official report from the Catalan Health Service stated that 1,066 people had been injured. The report was of an administrative nature and some aspects were not fully detailed. Moreover, the report didn't make any kind of medical analysis. With the help of the Board of the College of Physicians of Barcelona, I obtained all the data of the injured people and carried out and published the study "Descriptive statistics of the people attended to by the Catalan Health Service as a consequence of the police charges on the day of the referendum on self-determination in Catalonia on October 1 st 2017". The aim of the present Opinion Article was to publicize the main results of the study to the scientific community and highlight the importance of the medical approach in the assessment of police violence. When including all the details and their critical analysis the impact of the police violence on the civilian population was much more significant than previously thought. It was also assessed that the police had acted with great violence and viciousness, as the following data show: a) More than a third of the traumas occurred in multiple body areas b) There were 34 traumatic brain injuries c) There were 65 injuries to the face d) About 80% of the lesions occurred in unauthorized body parts by the ethical code of police.
head injuries? An official report from the Catalan Health Service (Cat Salut), the entity in charge of public healthcare in Catalonia, answered some of these questions [2]. The report stated that 1,066 people had been injured. Most were adult men but there were 13 people over 79 years of age and 2 children under 11. The most frequent lesions were bruises and, to a lesser extent, other physical injuries and disorders by emotional impact. There were 7 people with a serious prognosis, suffering from multiple traumatisms, traumatic brain injuries and a myocardial infarction. However, the report was of an administrative nature and didn't make any kind of medical assessment or analysis. In addition, the diagnoses were incomplete, and the location of such injures was not described in detail. Therefore, I decided to conduct a study with the following cat website [5]. Our study provided new information that had not been included in the report carried out by Cat Salut. When including all the details and their critical analysis I was really surprised to see that the impact of the police violence on the civilian population was much more significant than I had previously thought. The most noteworthy results are summarized below: a) In the total of 1,066 people attended, 1,221 diagnoses were recorded, that is, several people had more than one diagnosis.
b) There were 1,109 non-specific location traumas, most of them contusions (920: 83%) and, to a lesser extent, wounds, fractures, soft tissue injuries and post-traumatic local pain.

c)
More than a third (432) of the non-specific location traumas occurred in multiple body areas.

Conclusion
The critical analysis of the injuries carried out with a medical approach allows us to conclude that police officers did not follow their own basic principles of conduct since they gave multiple blows and struck unauthorized areas. In addition, the large number of facial and TBI injures suggests a high degree of aggression and viciousness against the people they were hitting. This inappropriate behavior by the police force will need to be assessed in relation to the Spanish government's unclear intentions regarding the population of Catalonia.