SENZA CENSURA n.5
Italy, June 2001
ITALY: FOR CITZEN'S SECURITY. BUT WICH ONES?
By Senza Censura
Last March 6th the Senate Chamber approved definitely the so-called
"security package", that is a series of new rules and modifications to the Criminal Code in point of microcriminality, on the pretext of defending citizens. In full coherence with the trend to changes that have the object to reinforce more and more the preventive-repressive set, that legislative measure envisages much more punishing penalties for stealings and bag-snatchings, almost wiping out the defence opportunities of the defendant.
Moreover there will be much more freedom of inquiry for the criminal
investigation service, which consequently holds the role of who fixes his eyes and ears on "crooks".
As for the housebreaking is provided a penalty up to 6 years' imprisonment, in particular if to the detriment of the elderly or the handicapped. They will not have anymore to lodge a complaint going to a police or CC office, but it's enough to call and a policeman comes on site (art. 17).
Convicts considered more dangerous can be imprisoned right after the first degree trial, while they could appeal to the Supreme Court of Appeal through a special division constituted to speed things up (art. 6). The criminal investigation service can also follow autonomous investigating tracks with respect to the Prosecuting Attorney, while the territory (by order of the government) can be controlled by the soldiers (see Naples), who already have the power to identify and restrain people considered suspicious or dangerous and then put them in the hands of the police (art.18).
The prefect will chair provincial security committees, while the information of investigation will be examined by the data processing centre of the Police Force.
Those measures aim to move in the prefect's hands what before started from the mayor. It's a way to put into a legal form those practices already in force. How the repressive apparatus, through the 22 articles of the security package, acts to oppose any form of extralegal survival, it's basically the same with which, on greater dimensions, sets itself up towards workers and their attempts of self-organization, the most mature expectations of their class, the myriads of counteracting realities and towards the revolutionary organizations.
That attack is often addressed to the immigrants, clearly mentioned in a recent interview to the Minister of the Interior Mr. Bianco, as main
responsible of stealings and bag-snatchings and whose expulsion from Italy is seen as the solution that in the last months permitted a considerabledecrease of slight crimes.
But here we are to the point: why right when the statistical data show a considerable downfall of robberies and stealings (see the scheme below) they get ready to increase the repressive measures? The inversely proportional correlation between the two tendencies explains how behind the so-called protection of the citizens there is, really, the aim to conform to those control parameters imposed by the USA (see Senza Censura n. 2 pp. 29-35) and by them already largely applied in the '90. We are in an era of telecameras spread everywhere, of a life stressed by mobiles and magnetic cards, of a technology applied for the precautionary measures and the social control that hits in particular the less guaranteed social classes. And we don't have to believe that the globalization of the economic exploitation doesn't go along with that of the social imprisonment.
So we must analyse properly the steps done by the imperialist middle class, also the smallest ones, in order to be able to set going a right meditation on the level of adjustment that the fight must pursue against an enemy more and more multiform, but at the same time clutched by increasing and, by now, badly concealing contradictions.
Data on some crimes in Italy 1999 2000
crimes in general -2,1% -5,6%
murders -8,1% -17,1%
housebreakings -5,0% -9,1%
carbreakings -7,2% -13,3%
bag-snatchings -5,8% -10,2%
robberies -57,6%
Source: Ministry of the Interior (1999-2000)