"There are just over 300 policemen left to guarantee the safety of more than 800 kilometers of beaches in Portugal", says the ASPPM, in a statement.

“With an average age of 44.5 years and with the enormous scarcity of human resources, (which for more than two decades ASPPM has been alerting the guardianship to the need to increase its staff), it was with great apprehension that Maritime Police professionals found that Prime Minister António Costa is unaware of the extent and reality of the problem, ”says the association.

On Saturday, in an interview with Expresso, António Costa said that, due to the covid-19 pandemic, restrictive measures on the beaches will be necessary, stating that there can be no agglomeration.

"The municipalities and captaincies will have to take the necessary measures so that we can go to the beach without an agglomeration," said the head of the Government.

The ASPPM recalls that on April 7, at the National Defense Commission, the Minister of National Defense (MDN), confronted with the lack of human resources in the Maritime Police, stated “being comfortable with the current model of dual use , since it allows 90% of the Maritime Police force to be involved in operational service because it has the support of the military branch of the Portuguese Navy ”.

“The ASPPM publicly called attention to the lack of rigor in the figures presented by the MDN, which demonstrate a total ignorance and alienation from the reality of the functioning and management of the only police it supervises”, he says.

According to the association, the Maritime Police currently has about 545 professionals on duty on the continent and islands.

Of these professionals, he says, 10% are effectively in pre-retirement and 40% are serving in the general command of the Maritime Police, in the School of the Maritime Authority, in the Special Unit of the Maritime Police and in the administrative services of the Captaincies.

"The captaincies are simply administrative and conservative entities, with no responsibility for public safety matters on the beaches," he says.

Thus, he says, the Prime Minister “endorses the resolution of the problem of the beaches to the municipalities and captaincies, now it remains to be seen whether the municipalities send their municipal police, and the captaincies send the navy military, knowing that neither one nor others have competencies of security force, nor maintenance of public order and tranquility ”.

For the ASPPM, the lack of personnel in the Maritime Police is just a matter of political will, namely from the Government, which insists on keeping this police “in this waning state”.

In Portugal, the covid-19 pandemic has already caused 714 deaths among the 20,206 people registered as infected, according to official data released today.

The disease is transmitted by a new coronavirus detected in late December in Wuhan, a city in central China.

To combat the pandemic, governments sent 4.5 billion people home (more than half the world's population), ended non-essential trade and drastically reduced air traffic, paralyzing entire sectors of the world economy.