There is always a news story to act as a fuse. In Turin as elsewhere. The beating with a hammer of a policeman, a very serious, deplorable episode, shakes public opinion and promptly reopens the “security” construction site. The script is known and has been repeated: new package, new crimes, more severe penalties, greater discretion for the police. Politics moves on the wave of emotion, promising quick and reassuring responses. But the stubborn question remains: does this path really produce more security or just the illusion of having done something at the cost of tightening individual freedoms? Italian legislative history teaches that laws written under the pressure of collective emotion are often bad laws. They are even more so when they apply habeas corpus, that is, the protection of physical restrictions (prison, detention, arrest), which dates back to the Magna Carta, that is, the fragile heart of the relationship between State and citizen. The Italian founding fathers knew this well. Veterans from the violence of the fascist Ovra and the brutality of the republican squads, the founding fathers chose to surround the deprivation of freedom with stringent guarantees, limiting power when it presents itself in uniform. Article 13 of the Constitution speaks of personal freedom as a supreme fundamental right, limited by judicial authority and subject to reservation of law and jurisdiction. The judge has the final say, not the policeman. It is not surprising, then, that calls for prudence are coming from the Quirinale. The President of the Republic, in his conversation with the Undersecretary to the Presidency of the Council Alfredo Mantovano, would have opened up to a conditional green light, asking for significant corrections both on the so-called criminal shield and on preventive police detention. Have they been done? We are not sure, because it is still a draft decree. In any case it would be a return to an idea of public order that recalls models far from our democratic tradition, closer to a police regime than to a constitutional state of law. To this must be added indications from Prime Minister Meloni to the judge based on greater severity in the treatment of those allegedly responsible for the events in Turin, as well as regretting the decision by the magistrates to release the suspects. An incorrect interference of the political power with the judicial one, which among other things risks being inserted improperly and instrumentally in the context of the referendum on the reform of the separation of careers. The emergency approach to security is nothing new, even if the current government seems to make it a distinctive feature, casually resorting to emergency decrees. Yet the data on crime – apart from the sensational cases, such as that of Turin – do not justify exceptional measures. What matters, rather, is a public debate distorted by sensationalism, which transforms the perception of insecurity into a multiplier of consensus (thanks also to the omnipresence of social media). The League’s proposed law in the pipeline is also based on this perception. These are 24 articles to repatriate migrants, voluntarily or otherwise. Even the regular ones. The Remigration and Reconquest Committee, they explained, makes it a question of security but also of national identity, to be recovered and safeguarded. A proposal as unworkable from an organizational point of view as it is brutal from a moral point of view, which harks back to the era of concentration camps and ghettos. The foundation of a new party by General Vannacci could trigger competition with the League through decrees and legislative proposals. And the one about “remigration”, even of regular immigrants, is the worst of all.
