Santander opens investigation into police officer who ignored bridge warning

The 112 call that went unrecorded before the collapse

A resident of Santander called 112 to report that something was wrong with a footbridge. The alert ended up on the mobile phone of a Local Police officer, one of those used when the landline is busy. The officer who answered considered, according to the report cited by the mayor, that there was no "serious or imminent risk." She said she would open a report. She didn't. She also did not contact any team to check if any were available. The structure collapsed, and according to several participants in the debate, the collapse resulted in fatalities.

The word the City Council repeats is tramitar (process). The one that does not appear in any system is registro (record).

What the report cited by the mayor of Santander says

The document describes a chain of missed actions. The officer "does not perceive a serious or imminent risk," according to the summary made by the mayor herself. She announces she will file a report and does not process it. She claims that no team was available at the time, but, according to the report, she didn't even check: "It is confirmed that she did not even contact any team to see if she could or not." And she adds a significant detail: if there had been no officers available, the alert would have been queued. It wasn't.

The municipal assessment is harsh: "It cannot be a mistake, even if she didn't understand it was that urgent. A local police officer or any Santander resident knows that falling onto the rocks there is very dangerous." The investigation remains open, with no known resolution in the material.

Why wasn't the 112 alert recorded by the Local Police?

Because 112 is the responsibility of the regional government, not the City Council. That is the first divergence in the case: the official channel for citizens and the dispatch center that ultimately manages the emergency do not coincide. The second is technical. The call came through a mobile phone, the one answered when the landline is busy, and through that channel, there was no recording or trace in the switchboard.

Therein lies the loophole: without a record, there is no queue, no report, and no way to know how many alerts vanish every day through the same channel. The system exists so that a citizen does not have to decide who is competent. In practice, someone decides in the first minute, and that someone is a person on the phone with their own judgment about urgency.

From the specific case to the judgment on public administration

A significant part of the reaction went far beyond the investigation. Some turned it into a condemnation of public employment as a category, with the thesis that everything public burdens the country, and made comparisons with healthcare, justice, or education. Another line focused on management: if the superior link lets the call pass, the failure is not of a single person. Some contributions, without any support in the report, attributed the outcome to the profile of the person who answered; the municipal document does not support anything similar.

In between, the argument of workload appeared, the only one with numbers. The usual shift for the force is 7x7: seven days worked and seven days off, with 22 vacation days and 7 personal days per year. The calculation circulating suggests that when requesting vacation during the service week, the system deducts only five days, because the program was never updated after implementing that schedule. If the calculation is correct—and it is read as an internal complaint, not official data—each officer gains rest without using leave. The full breakdown reveals a surprising difference.

There was also agreement on a procedural point: a structural danger warning cannot be resolved by phone. The repeated recommendation is to send a patrol, assess the danger, cordon off if confirmed, and then notify the operational services. Deciding if something is urgent is not the job of the person who answers the phone.

The conflict between the Local Police and the Santander City Council

There is a context that the case brings to light: the municipal staff has been in a prolonged confrontation with the governing team. There are reports of months of conflict with the mayor, broken communication, and a fine policy that has strained the relationship. That the first reproach lands in the form of an investigation against the person who was on the phone, rather than a protocol or a manager, sits poorly in that already deteriorated relationship.

Territorial comparisons also surfaced: local police officers in large cities evaluated as professionals versus medium-sized forces singled out for cronyism and for ending up offloading work onto other bodies. Without public data to confirm it, this remains a perception.

Who was inspecting the collapsed footbridge?

The report addresses the immediate issue, not the structural one. And the question arises in the case: if the alert comes from a resident, who was obligated to periodically inspect the structure? According to regional press cited in the debate, the State repaired two footbridges near the damaged one two years ago. This leaves open the question of criteria: why those and not this one. No institutional response has closed this avenue.

One alert, two phones, and no trace

The case has a part recognizable to anyone who has called a public administration: the alert exists, someone hears it, and the system loses it. Against that, an investigation is a small response. The mayor herself admits that 112 does not depend on the City Council, and yet, the investigation points to the person who answered the phone.

Two neighboring footbridges were repaired two years ago. This one was not. The criteria for why one was repaired and the other not remains without public explanation.