REPORT: From batons to barbecues, Catalan vote exposes police divisions

As Spanish police wielded batons and fired rubber bullets at crowds attempting to vote in Catalonia's banned independence referendum on Sunday, the region's own police force gave many voters a much gentler reception.
 
In Catalonia's pro-independence heartland, among the farming towns of Osona county north of Barcelona, the Catalan force made little attempt to remove people from polling stations despite being tasked with the same court order to shut them down.
 
Local courts received several complaints against the Catalan police accusing them of inactivity and failure to close down polling stations, despite a court order, the region's High Court said in a statement.
 
The regional police had been asked to provide more information about the complaints.
 
In Sant Pere and Osona's capital of Vic, crowds waited in orderly queues and cast their ballots in school halls, though the mood was jittery as photos of bloodied voters circulated via social media from the cities of Barcelona and Girona.
 
Spanish Deputy Prime Minister Soraya Saenz de Santamara said police had acted in a proportionate manner across the region.
 
In Sant Pere, children ran along the street playing tag, young people passed around barbecued kebabs and flagons of red wine, and pensioners at a retirement home nearby sat by windows and waved Catalan flags.
 
"If we don't win today, we will never be able to do it. This is the opportunity," Ramon Jordana, a 92-year-old former taxi driver said as he dropped his vote into a ballot box that organizers had smuggled into the town in the dead of night.
 
At the polling station in Sant Pere, a town of some 2,500 people close to the Pyrenees which symbolically declared independence from Spain back in 2012, voters arrived before sunrise and Jordana cast the first vote at 9am.
 
Officers from Catalonia's regional police, the Mossos d'Esquadra, had tried to enter Sant Pere and Vic's polling stations before voting began but crowds clustered around the entrances to stop them. They withdrew to applause and cheers.
 
"We won't use force to enter, but we'll stay outside all day in case at some point we can," one of the officers in Sant Pere told Reuters afterwards. He asked that he not be named.
        
SINGLE COMMAND CHAIN
 
Two officers in Sant Pere chatted casually with locals outside the polling station, and one of them posed with a child for a photo. After a second attempt to enter the voting centre, the crowd resisted and they retreated around a street corner.
 
In Osona's overwhelmingly separatist-controlled municipalities, opinion polls show support for independence tops 80 percent on average, around double the overall support among the Catalonia's 7.5 million population.
 
The referendum has been declared illegal by Spains central government in Madrid, which says the constitution states the country is indivisible, and it has dispatched police across Catalonia to seize ballot boxes and prevent people voting.