The Mayor of Porto, Pedro Duarte, revealed this Friday, November 21, that he will present in the “first quarter of 2026” a plan to reinforce security and “public tranquility” in the city.
“I have this project in my head to, in the first quarter of 2026, present a plan to reinforce security and public tranquility in the city of Porto. And, therefore, We are now working from an execution point of view, from a more technical point of view, on the solutions that we will be able to present for this plan”, said Pedro Duarte.
The president of the municipality was speaking about a meeting he had this week with the Minister of Internal Administration, Maria Lúcia Amaral, in which he revealed that the Government showed “a great openness” to talk about various possible solutions, including the possibility of increasing the number of permanent police officers in the city of Porto, one of the promises made during his electoral campaign.
“And therefore we will work on this path [de aumentar o número de agentes efetivos]. This is precisely what we are seeing now, particularly with the different authorities that will be involved, because we also want this plan to be very transversal”, he said.
For Pedro Duarte, the need for transversality is justified by some of the results of the five days of reinforced PSP policing in the Pasteleira and Pinheiro Torres neighborhoods, which resulted, according to statements from this police force to Lusa, in a migration of drug trafficking to the Ramalde and Viso neighborhoods.
“A specific measure can solve a specific problem, but perhaps we are opening up another problem on the side. As we have the good example of a police intervention, like the one that took place in recent days in Pasteleira Nova – which we welcome – but it does not solve the fundamental problem, because it is temporary, on the one hand, and, on the other, there ends up being a transfer of the problem from one area of the city to another”, he declared.
That is why the municipality hopes to have a plan that is “a little more successful”, explained Pedro Duarte.
The mayor was speaking on the sidelines of a visit to the garden that was created in the place of the S. Sebastião Market, next to the Cathedral.
The market building was a point of drug trafficking and consumption in this area of the Historic Center and, with its demolition, Pedro Duarte hopes that security will be “returned” to the area.
Despite recognizing that “there are urban solutions that help” to disperse possible trafficking points, he said he is not “innocent” and realizes that it is necessary to “do much more than that”.
“We really want to combat the problem in its genesis. And that’s why there are other measures that have to be taken, from a social point of view, to monitor those who suffer from this disease, but also from a police point of view: we have a repressive capacity different from the one we have had. And a strategy to combat drugs that has to be different from the one we have had”, he concluded.