The First Chamber of the Constitutional Court has endorsed the compensation of almost 100,000 euros to an exagent of the Local Police of Torrevieja who suffered a “constant harassment” by its hierarchical superiors after having denounced irregularities that “systematically” irregularities in the bosom of the body. The judgment, published this Friday in the Official State Gazette (BOE), considers “judicially accredited” the “harassment behaviors” suffered by agent Antonio RB, a career officer who held the status of victim protected by the Valencian Agency Antifraud. And it also emphasizes that the Torrevieja City Council “actively starred in institutionally and within its scope of powers, some of the harassment actions that appear judicially accredited.”
The Administrative Contentious Court number 1 of Elche estimated in 2018 the claim of patrimonial responsibility for labor harassment promoted by the police. After a appeal, the Second Section of the Superior Court of Justice of the Valencian Community (TSJ-CV) knocked down the initial sentence, discarding the existence of workplace harassment. Subsequently, the Administrative Contentious Chamber of the Supreme Court inadmitted the appeal for the agent against the Judgment of the TSJ-CV. Finally, the uniformed submitted an appeal for the TC, which has endorsed the initial sentence declaring it firm.
The Calvary of the uniformed began in 2010, when the newcomer to the Local Police of Torrevieja, with the popular Pedro Hernández Mateo as mayor, warned of the lack of control of the cash raised in fines or the “systematic” inspections in certain leisure premises against passivity with other establishments “despite the unfavorable reports”.
Three years later, along with two other police officers, he denounced the facts, for which an inspector and two agents were investigated. The complaint triggered harassment: among other episodes, shifts were changed without warning and others were imposed without mandatory rest, vacations were denied and his gun of the gunsmith and documents of his box office disappeared.
Manuel Antonio Lv, one of the co -defendant police chiefs with the City Council, published a “pamphlet” in which he called the “cephalopod” agent and “viscous animal and disgusting animal” and revealed data from the private sphere in an advertisement board “in view of all staff.” For his part, the head of the Local Police of Torrevieja Cuemandado, Vicente GS, sent a letter to the Alicante Traffic Headquarters that the agent could have lost powers for driving vehicles.
In 2016, he found a “rare -raised atmosphere” in his new destination, the City Council of Alguazas, in the Region of Murcia. After asking a partner, he discovered that “from Torrevieja” they had sent their medical history and “manifested from there that was conflictive.” Subsequently, he was transferred to Lorca, “where he is working working.”
The Vicente GS and Manuel Antonio LV (the latter retired) police have already been considered as “labor harassment inductors” in two “very similar” procedures for which the Consistory of the Vega Baja region had to pay compensation to two other agents for a total amount of 71,950 euros.
The “true and true” work harassment “for several years” of the inspector and the head of the Local Police was a situation “known, allowed and consented” by the Torrevieja City Council. “Repeatedly,” both police officers were “instigators of other harass” to uniformed from the Local Police, the sentence argues.
The judge of instance stressed that the Torrevieja City Council did not contribute witnesses or expert reports that distorted the agent’s version. On the contrary, the victim’s evidence on the violation of his fundamental rights, his personal dignity and his moral integrity were “conclusive.”
The “hostile atmosphere” and “psychological violence”
The TC endorses the initial sentence and recalls that “although the concept of workplace harassment can understand situations or behaviors of diverse kinds, punctual or repeated over time, all of them have in common (…) their character degrading of the working conditions or in the hostility that they entail and that have as a result or as a result attempt or endanger the personal integrity of the employee.”
The Court of Guarantees concludes that there is a “clearly indicatorial panorama” of the alleged constitutional infraction, which shows a “reasonable suspicion” that the treatment received by the police supposed a practice of workplace harassment that “significantly harmed its physical and moral integrity.”
“In a repeated and deliberate way he humbled himself with the purpose and effect of violating his dignity, creating for this a hostile environment and psychological violence that not only led him to continuously claim the change of workplace, but was aggravated with the repeated negative of the City Council to grant it to the point of influencing significantly in his state of physical and mental health,” says the sentence.
The TC also makes “special incidence” that the City of Torrevieja “not only remained consciously oblivious to hostile behaviors” towards the police, in a “repeated passive position” maintained “for years”, but “actively starred in institutionally and within its scope of powers, some of the harassment actions that appear judicially accredited.”
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