On Saturday 24 October 2026, a few hundred young people in hoods and black looted the centre of Barcelona. Plaça de Catalunya, the Ramblas, 23 shops, 33 fires, 128 arrests — more than half of them minors — 15 officers injured, four seriously. People trapped inside El Corte Inglés with the shutters down. That same night Europe had Paris and Marseille under stones again, and Milan locked down with paratroopers. The method is the same: cover the face and throw. The European answer is the same: a man of flesh in front of the stone, and a regulation that treats facial recognition as if it were the problem.
Four days ago I wrote that Europe regulates the cookie banner and not a bank blackout. On Saturday the pattern repeated in the square. They regulate the drone. They regulate the camera. They regulate “where the data is”. And they send a Catalan officer, a CRS, a carabiniere, to have his face opened by a minor in a balaclava who organised himself on TikTok.
1. Barcelona, a TikTok and a balaclava
The call went out as “Blocus Barcelona” and “Institut Indignats”. A copy of the French Lycéens Indignés movement. Anonymous TikTok posters from 20 October, QR codes into WhatsApp, then Telegram and Instagram, instructions to loot. On Friday Newtral had already seen more than twenty profiles, advertising Madrid, Valencia, Alicante and Bilbao as well. The Mossos watched the networks and budgeted for 300 people and minor incidents. Five or six hundred came. It started at six in the evening. By half past seven it was no longer a protest.
Black. Hood. Stone. Shopfront. Bin. Barricade. A van. Another shopfront. Clothes, electronics. 68 reports for knives, sprays, balaclavas, fireworks and stones. 450 identified. 128 arrested: 122 men, six women, 72 minors. Only two had prior records for public disorder. About twenty, for other things. Interior minister Núria Parlon said it without theatre: gratuitous violence and vandalism. It was not the housing camp. It was not a right. It was a looting with a school slogan.
Mayor Collboni promises to join the cases and bill the parents. Salvador Illa says violence has no place. Fine. The shop in the centre, the one that drops the shutter with customers inside, already knows what has a place and what does not. What has no place is that in 2026 a group called up from an anonymous phone turns the square into a hunting ground and goes home with the face covered.
2. France: the original, two Saturdays in a row
Barcelona invented nothing. It copied.
On 17 October France actually burned. 2,628 arrests. 1,522 shops. 1,144 officers injured. 2,025 fires. Curfews. Sentinelle soldiers. RAID, GIGN, helicopters, Centaure vehicles. Limoges city hall, torched. The prime minister promised a “massive” operation for the following Saturday.
On the 24th, 70,000 police. 10,000 more than the week before. 410,000 people according to the Interior Ministry, 800,000 according to the CGT. The march, for the most part, was a protest. At nightfall, again the 500 hooded youths in Paris, gas and water cannon. In Marseille, two jewellers. Lyon, Bordeaux, Grenoble, Lille, Rennes, Nantes, Toulouse. The tally: 1,314 arrests, 24 shops looted, 53 officers injured, 75 fires. Better than the 17th. It is still a night of urban war in flesh uniforms.
Interior minister Laurent Nuñez accused the far left and the gangs of using the disorder to steal. Gérald Darmanin said they will identify the looters with facial recognition on the TAJ file and on TikTok, Instagram and Discord. Meaning: afterwards. When the window is already on the ground. When the officer is already in hospital. Europe allows recognition after the fact, with paperwork. Real time, in the square, is what the regulation treats as taboo.
3. Italy: 500 paratroopers, and still
Milan on the 17th left almost 200 officers injured and a million euros of damage in the city alone. Meloni sent 500 Folgore paratroopers until year-end, a new offence of violent participation in a demonstration, more places in juvenile centres, parents on the hook. Salvini asked for Lince vehicles and drones. On Saturday the 24th, Milan woke up with plywood on the shopfronts and 1,300 soldiers from Strade Sicure. Ten thousand people in the march. The centre, closed. There were batons on corso Venezia. There was not the looting of the week before.
The national tally: 4,292 identified, 371 taken to police stations — 110 minors, 69 foreigners — 87 charged, 9 arrested. Meloni: “Curious that the left worries more about the soldiers than about the violent.” Piantedosi: no more no-go zones. Of the three countries, Italy is the only one that has climbed a step. It is still a step of men. Not of system.
Last week I wrote that Europe regulates too much and punishes badly, and that the Italian measures were not the ones a lot of people — myself included — would have wanted. Saturday confirmed it. Italy contained. France contained in part, with an army of police. Barcelona did not contain: it underestimated a TikTok and put 210 riot officers out to collect stones.
4. The hood is the method
This is not folklore. It is the engineering of impunity.
You cover the face. You throw the stone. You appear in every video and on no file. The balaclava, the hood, the mask, the full veil: different costumes, the same function. That a camera does not put a name on you. In a riot, black and a hood are the uniform. In the street, any covering that erases the face turns a crime into a ghost. France banned the full veil in public in 2010 for a reason that was not theological: a state cannot live with unnameable citizens. The rest of Europe still argues over whether naming it is in poor taste. Saturday in Barcelona was not a religious debate. It was a QR code, a Telegram channel and a balaclava seized on a report.
Someone who goes hooded to smash a shopfront is not exercising a right. They are manufacturing an optical alibi. And Europe, which forces every website to ask whether you accept cookies, forces no one to show a face when they break a business.
5. The face, infrared, the evidence
Facial recognition is not black magic. It is a camera, a model and a database. In 2026 half the world uses it to unlock a phone. On 2 August Europe put the AI Act into full application: remote biometric identification in real time, in public space, for the police, banned by default. Narrow exceptions — missing persons, an imminent threat to life, terror, serious offences carrying four years or more — with prior judicial authorisation. After-the-fact analysis is “high risk”, not a taboo, and even then it cannot be an untargeted sweep. The EU Fundamental Rights Agency has just reminded member states not to let it become routine.
Routine is exactly what you need when 600 people in hoods turn a square into a looting. Not to spy on whoever is buying bread. So that the person who throws the stone has a name before they reach the metro. A face is evidence in a trial. A face is a removal file, when it applies. Without a face, the minor goes home, the foreigner with no right to stay dissolves into the night, and the shop pays for the glass.
Infrared is not a whim. At night, under a hood, in smoke, with the square dark, the visible camera gives up. Thermal sees the body. Recognition by gait, by silhouette, by the second they drop the hood at a metro mouth or in front of a cash machine: that exists. You do not need X-rays through a veil. You need not to design the system so that a piece of cloth wins. Cameras on the perimeter, on the way in, at the moment the costume stops working. And yes: anyone who covers the face in order to commit a crime should lose the benefit of that covering. The alternative is to gift anonymity to the person who breaks things.
Italy transposed the AI Act in a September decree. The privacy authority has already objected. France uses recognition afterwards, on social-media photos, and even that is denounced as an outrage. Spain, for now, sends riot police. The European order of priorities is this: first the opinion, then the glass.
6. The drone, banned when it is needed
A drone over Plaça de Catalunya on Saturday would have seen the groups, the barricades, who was breaking and who was filming, in real time, without putting a man ten metres from the stone. Europe has an EASA rulebook so that a private citizen cannot fly over your garden without permission and must notify Interior five days ahead. The police operate under a separate regime, and still every city, every data-protection authority, every duty judge turns a public-order flight into a file. Salvini asked for drones for Milan. Asking is easy. Having them over the square, in the minute of the looting, is what Europe has made hard on purpose.
The result is grotesque. Frontex and the borders fill up with drones on European money. The centre of Barcelona, on Saturday, was covered by 210 Brimo officers. The sky, empty. The person organising on Telegram has a better view of the city than the state.
7. Optimus, RoboCop, and who takes the stone
On Wednesday Tesla said the first production-quality Optimus robots are coming off the Fremont line. Robots for dangerous, repetitive work, around the clock. Deliveries to outside customers, if it holds, late 2027. It is not a police officer. Not yet. It is a machine you can send in where a slab of stone opens a man’s head.
Anyone who has never seen an Optimus should get the picture: a humanoid that does not bleed, that does not have children at home, that does not fill in an injury report. RoboCop was a film. The thesis was not: there are places where the first to arrive should not be a 28-year-old on a public salary and a helmet. There are places where the stone has to meet metal.
Europe, if it follows the manual, will regulate the public-order robot as it has regulated the camera and the drone: first the opinion, then the fear of precedent, then the de facto ban. Meanwhile, on 24 October, four Mossos in serious condition. 53 French officers. Almost 200 Italians the week before. The state puts flesh. The hooded one puts cloth. The cloth wins the night and sometimes loses, on Monday at the station, if someone pulled the hood down in time.
I am not asking for an army of robots firing on the Ramblas. I am asking that it stop being taboo to put a machine where today we put a lung. A drone. A camera that names. A humanoid that takes the first hit. The officer, behind, to arrest someone who already has a face.
8. Europe will not be Europe again with a banner
Europe has specialised in the right not to be seen. The right to the cookie. The right for your data not to travel. The right to cover your face. The right for an algorithm not to name you in the square. Each of those rights, in the abstract, can be defended. Together, on Saturday, they produce this: a wrecked shop, a customer locked in, an officer in A&E, a minor who is in class tomorrow, and a Telegram thread already calling the next one.
The technology that would do the job exists. Cameras. Infrared. Recognition. Drones. Robots Tesla has just started building so that a worker is not sent into a place that kills. Europe has it in the lab and has it tied up in the official journal. The AI Act, EASA, the Spanish data authority, the Italian Garante, the CNIL: an archipelago of vetoes. The person who throws the stone does not file a privacy impact assessment.
Italy has taken a step: soldiers, a new offence, parents who pay. France has taken a step: 70,000 uniforms and recognition after the fact. Spain, last night, took the usual step: condemn, join the case, and count the arrested the next day. None of the three has taken the step that matters: that covering your face in order to smash things stops working.
Without a face there is no trial that holds. Without a face there is no removal that stands. Without a drone and without a camera, the officer is the sensor, and the sensor bleeds. Anyone who wants Europe again — streets you can walk, shops that open on Monday, a state that names the person who hits it — will have to use the technology it already has. Or keep sending men against hoods, and writing statements at dawn.