You're correct, but that wasn't my point. Just because something is legal / illegal, doesn't automatically make it right or good / wrong or bad.

I think they are trying to determine how the population is split by the voting.

If it's a large enough population that doesn't want to live under the Spanish rule, they shouldn't. And if there's a minority that does want to live under the Spanish rule, they still can, just move to Spain.

The problem is far worse: 1) The Court gave orders to the regional police. 2) The regional police IGNORED the orders for a week (there are videos proving that). 3) The Court, after the innactivity of the regional police, asked the "inter-state" police ("Policia Nacional" and "Guardia Civil", that are polices that operate in Spain at global level) to do the work the regional police ignored to do (they pretended doing it, but not doing anything).

Now, Catalan nationalists/separatists (one half of the Catalan population) have the photo of "violent Spanish police" repressing "idealist people just voting", while the truth is that regional police has been boycotting the Court during a week, against the rule of law. This is going to get ugly, probably with regional government and regional police authorities charged with many years of jail.

LMFTFY: now, the world have the photo of violent Spanish police repressing idealist people just voting.

(I'm still looking for how to make fit the local police not doing its job in the story of those violence... maybe there is a rational justification using facts unknown to me; like the central government only employing unstable violent people for their police forces, who have been rejected by local ones?)

Unless you consider the "work" of police is to beat the local population especially when they have their hands up.

I completely understand the narrative you gave for what happened before all that shit and agree with its factual aspects, but it does not magically provides quotes for clearly documented behaviors. People justifying violence by politics are, IMO, the most dangerous. It is inadmissible to sound like a local police force ignoring court order justify central police violence against a population.

Putting pacific, albeit illegal, people in jail worked wonders in the cases of Gandhi and Mandela. The spanish government should be in some kind of delusional state if they think they can solve this problem jailing people.