Porto, Portugal, Nov. 21, 2025 (Lusa) - The recently elected mayor of Portugal's second city, Porto, Pedro Duarte, revealed on Friday that he will present a plan to strengthen security and "public safety" in the city in the "first quarter of 2026".
"I have this project in mind to present a plan to strengthen security and public tranquillity in the city of Porto in the first quarter of 2026. And so we are now working from an implementation point of view, from a more technical point of view, on the solutions we will be able to present for this plan," Pedro Duarte said today.
The mayor was speaking about a meeting he had this week with the country's interior minister, Maria Lúcia Amaral, about which he revealed that the Government showed "great openness" to discuss various possible solutions, including the possibility of increasing the number of police officers in the city of Porto, one of the promises made during his election campaign.
"And so we are going to work in this direction [of increasing the number of permanent officers]. This is precisely what we are now looking at, particularly with the different authorities that will be involved, because we also want this plan to be very cross-cutting," he said.
For Pedro Duarte, the need for cross-cutting action is justified by some of the results of five days of reinforced policing by the Public Security Police force (PSP) in the Pasteleira and Pinheiro Torres neighbourhoods, which, according to statements made by this police force to Lusa, resulted in a shift of drug trafficking to the Ramalde and Viso neighbourhoods.
"A specific measure can solve a specific problem, but we may be creating another problem alongside it. We have the good example of a police intervention, such as the one that took place in recent days in Pasteleira Nova - which we welcome - but it does not solve the underlying problem, because it is temporary, on the one hand, and, on the other, it ends up transferring the problem from one area of the city to another," he said.
That is why the local authority hopes to have a "slightly more successful" plan, explained Pedro Duarte.
The mayor was speaking on the sidelines of a visit to the garden that was created on the site of the S. Sebastião Market, next to the Cathedral.
The market building was a hub for drug trafficking and consumption in this area of the historic centre, and with its demolition, Pedro Duarte hopes that safety will be "restored" to the area.
While acknowledging that "there are urban planning solutions that help" to disperse possible trafficking hotspots, he said he was not “naive” and understood that it was necessary to "do much more than that".
"We really want to tackle the problem at its root. And so there are other measures that need to be taken, from a social point of view, to support those who suffer from this disease, but also from a policing point of view: we need to have a different repressive capacity than we have had. And a strategy to combat drugs that has to be different from the one we have had," he concluded.
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