Walter Finch
A BRITISH expat claims he has been targeted by local police in a shocking campaign of ‘racist abuse and harassment’ because he can’t speak Spanish.
Shop owner Mark Lumsden believes that the Policia Local in the Mallorca village of Valldemossa have maintained a vendetta against him for over eight years.
He even alleges that an off-duty officer approached him outside a bar one night in 2020 and screamed at him ‘have some respect’ and ‘learn Spanish or go back to England.’
“Two people at the bar had to grab him and force him off down the street,” Lumsden told the Olive Press.
“I only found out two days later that this man, who I had never seen before in my life, was a local policeman.”
The 64-year-old moved to Mallorca from Stockton-on-Tees with his wife and young daughter, then three-years-old, in 2013, where he opened a gift shop called Valldemossa Secrets.
For Lumsden, the sleepy village of 2,000 people on the north side of the island would be a ‘a great environment to bring up my child’.
But the peace and tranquillity wasn’t to last as Lumsden seemed to make enemies of a high-ranking police officer who is reported to have told neighbours he openly ‘hated’ the Englishman.
Some days after the encounter outside the bar, Lumsden claims that the same officer came to his shop accompanied by the chief of police.
Expecting to receive an apology or explanation from the officer now he had ‘sobered up’, the shop owner was shocked to find that the policeman launched into another rant about how he must learn Spanish.
“The chief of police had to tell him to shut up and took him away!” said Lumsden, who’s been running the shop for nine years.
But then, according to Lumsden, the senior police officer returned the following day with a cap and plain clothes ‘like Inspector Clouseau’, looking to see if there were cameras in the shop that had recorded the exchange.
“And when I challenged him, he said ‘no, no, no, no – I was just looking at the tiles.’”
On a separate occasion on June 6 this year, Lumsden found that a van passing outside the shop had accidentally damaged his sign.
“The lady who lives opposite came down and gave me a picture of the vehicle,” he explained.
“It was a commercial van with the name of the company and a totally clear picture of the number plate.
“She said he hit the side of my veranda first, and then he smashed her side, then mine again.”
But when he went to report the incident at the local police station, a separate officer refused to process the claim.
“He just said they didn’t see it so they can’t do anything. I said ‘I’ve got the picture, I’ve got a witness who saw it, and you’re telling me nope.’ And he just shrugged his shoulders and walked away.”
And then most recently, on August 5, Lumsden had to go to the station to file a police report in order to make a bank claim.
“Who should be sitting there? Nightmare of nightmares – him again!”
The same officer who had allegedly abused him outside the bar and in his own shop ‘refused to even speak’ to Lumsden.
“He just said I don’t understand enough English.”
But Lumsden had anticipated such a problem and had already had the claim translated into Spanish. But the officer ‘wouldn’t even look at it.’
Another police officer came over, according to Lumsden.
“He listened to what I had to say, then looked at the translation, and his first words to me were: ‘How long have you lived in this village?’
“I said, ‘why does that matter? I just want a report.’
“He said: ‘I speak English. Why don’t you speak Spanish?’”
Despite his best efforts to make formal complaints about the alleged treatment, to both the local town hall and the Guardia Civil, neither has come to anything.
Lumsden insists that the Guardia Civil have been sympathetic to his situation, but they too have lacked the translators to process his complaint. A police officer at the local station in Valldemossa told the Olive Press that they have ‘no problem with him – neither personal nor professional.’ But she added that she could not comment further.
