Although the focus is different, because structural issues are decisive for our action, we cannot ignore this issue, as it is also enlightening of current affairs.
It’s called “paid service”, but it often sounds like something else: an extra shift imposed, on a day of rest, to fill potholes and make events happen – public and private – at the expense of the time, body and family of those who patrol the street. The Ordinance that regulates these services itself admits the paradox: it provides for them to be provided “outside normal hours”, but opens the door to appointment “on an exceptional basis” when there are no volunteers and recalls that this does not take away the “permanent and mandatory nature of the police service”.
And this is where the system becomes indecent: when “pay” stops being a choice and becomes a duty, the State has the obligation to pay in a simple, transparent and fair way. Instead, an anomaly was invented that would be difficult to explain to any citizen: two tables for the same job, as if authority, risk and responsibility varied depending on the administrative etiquette of the event. The ASPP/PSP says it bluntly: it is “inexplicable and unacceptable” to have Table A and Table B when “police work is police work”, especially when it is done in their free time – and without the agents having to “sponsor jointly” what the State decides to share.
The Ordinance clarifies the logic of inequality: Table B applies, among others, to sporting events “when reimbursed” and to non-professional competitions. Translation: when there is public participation, the value is… lower. In 2025, for example, an officer in a 4-hour period (weekdays 8am–8pm) appears at €44.87 in Table A, but €31.70 in Table B – for the same police officer, the same uniform, the same street.
This is not “management”, it is transferring the cost to those who already pay with their own rest.
Then there is the second absurdity: the time grid is blind to the meaning of the hours. Working on a normal night and working on Christmas Eve can fall into the same remuneration “bag”. ASPP/PSP calls it an “outdated” mismatch: a service on Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve could never be worth the same as a service after 8pm on any business day. It’s the kind of detail that reveals a lot: whoever draws the table knows the calendar… but doesn’t feel the consequences.
ASPP/PSP has long pointed out a reasonable solution: paying for the “quality” of hours, as happens in other sectors with shift work, increasing more difficult periods (nights, weekends and holidays) and disciplining demand to reduce the temptation of “exceptional orders” which, in practice, have become routine. And it is not a whim: it is recognizing that permanent availability is not a license to exhaust people – and that physical and psychological exhaustion, when accumulated, enters through the door of mental health and leaves through the window of family life.
In 2025, the Assembly of the Republic itself recommended that the proposed amendment to the Ordinance on paid services be approved. But the debate continues: recently, a Government proposal to increase these values by 15% was reported. There are also initiatives that have come to fruition to set maximum payment deadlines (for example, 60 days after service, by the PCP), because the risk of charging third parties cannot fall on those who have already complied – and the fact that the State takes many months to pay for the paid services that are their responsibility also shows a lot of the respect that the State/Government has for the police.
But no percentage, nor any deadline resolves the core of the ridiculousness as long as it remains: two tables, one of them lower, in a service that can be imposed. If the State wants policing, it must finance it without tricks and without imposing “solidarity” in hours stolen from rest. The uniform cannot be the budget adjustment variable – much less when it is called upon to guarantee everyone’s safety.