The commander of the Lisbon Metropolitan Command (Cometlis) of the PSP, Luís Elias, argued in an interview with the Lula agency that the Lisbon area is operating with minimum staff for all needs, warning of the need for more police officers in the country's largest command. Cometlis covers nine municipalities with a population of approximately three million people, including Amadora, Cascais, Lisbon, Loures, Odivelas, Oeiras, Sintra, Vila Franca de Xira and Torres Vedras, with only six thousand police officers for this daily population.
Luís Elias highlighted that Cometlis is the largest armed and uniformed unit in the country, responsible for the most complex events such as public demonstrations, major sporting, cultural and political events, security at embassies and sovereign bodies. Its staff is larger than the Portuguese Navy and the Judicial Police, but despite this size, resources are not abundant. The commander stated that the number of police officers cannot drop below a certain level and they need more officers without specifying how many are needed.
Regarding the two hundred police officers promised in May by Prime Minister Luís Montenegro for Lisbon, the commander mentioned that a training course for agents is underway at the Police Practical School that ends on December 18th, hoping that a significant part of these police officers will be assigned to Cometlis. In May, when the last agent training course ended, 190 police officers were assigned to Lisbon.
The PSP submitted a restructuring plan to the Ministry of Internal Administration that includes the closure of police stations in Lisbon, Porto, and Setúbal. Luís Elias stated that in some cases it does not involve closure but rather the reconversion of existing police stations into other types of police facilities, with the aim of placing more police officers in operational functions on the street, street projects and greater capacity to respond to citizens' requests in preventive and reactive perspective.
