The Spanish police has been reiteratedly criticized in European reports for ill-treatment and lack of accountability. Indeed, according to the Political Terror Scale measuring state-sanctioned violence (e.g., police brutality), Spain is one of the most repressive countries in Europe. However, all this contrasts with a very positive perception of the police by the Spanish society, relative to other countries. I argue that this paradox might be explained by the verticalization of society brought by a long Francoist dictatorship which followed a bloody Civil War. Aiming to quantitatively approach this idea, I exploit sub-national variation in levels of Francoist repression during the Civil War and the post-war period, as regime’s indoctrination in the necessity of strong hierarchies to preserve order and stability might have been easier in those places which suffered more repression, due to a combination of heightened risk aversion and fear of a new conflict. Looking at three different geographical levels (municipalities, provinces and autonomous communities) and employing three different surveys, I find that individuals in areas which experienced more Francoist repression during the Civil War and its aftermath value the police more positively nowadays. Consistent with previous research on the legacies of violence, the effect of repression weakens for younger generations. Furthermore, I discard several alternative explanations to the one I propose, and show that Francoist repression correlates also with different attitudes argued to mediate the relationship with attitudes towards the police. Finally, I show similar results for the case of the Guatemalan Civil War.