No Alicante police officers available for overtime at Christmas

The Alicante Local Police want more officers to help them out at the end of the year. The City Council is thinking about launching a fresh recruitment period for officers […]

November 27, 2025 2 Mins Read

The Alicante Local Police want more officers to help them out at the end of the year. The City Council is thinking about launching a fresh recruitment period for officers who want to work extra hours since there aren’t enough officers available for overtime to handle the number of events and services that are expected in the next few weeks.

In 2008, the Local Governing Board agreed to set up an annual pool of overtime hours for the force. This allowed up to 250 officers to do 12 extra services per year, for a total of 3,000 actions. The City Council, on the other hand, thinks this number is “increasingly insufficient” because there are more events of all types and more cops are needed, and many of these activities don’t happen because officers retire, resign, or leave for other reasons.

Strengthening agents

The annual funding is already gone, which makes it harder to offer further services in the next few weeks. These weeks will see not only the first Elche-Alicante International Marathon (on November 30th), but also a lot more people on the streets because of the Christmas vacations. In light of this, the lack of available officers makes it necessary to strengthen the personnel at busy times. In fact, an internal study from the force already cautions that the teams scheduled for the race need to be strengthened in order to make sure the event is safe.

The City Council wants to add more “overtime hours” for end-of-year activities for all of these reasons. The local administration will bring this up at the next meeting of the Negotiating Committee, which is set for this Wednesday. The suggested approach is to use the 3,000 open slots to strengthen the different teams. This would need changing the agreement that governs the measure so that the pool can be reopened on an unusual basis to get more volunteers if it doesn’t fill up.

The document says that authorities who choose this approach will get paid more for each service they undertake. Traffic cops and controllers will get €250, while supervisors would get €290 a day.