Law Enforcement Activities in Italy

Despite the fact that no one nourishes doubts about their importance, we know little or nothing about the forces of order in Italy, about how they are organized, about their daily activities, about the difficulties they encounter in their work. The greater part of the available studies of the police go back to the 1960s and 1970s, and many of these had denunciation rather than understanding as their end. Unlike what has happened in the United States and Great Britain, and more recently in France and Germany, rigorous and systematic studies in this field had never been done in our country. With this article, in which we present the results of our research from the last three years, we propose to fill (even if only in minimal part) this noticeable gap. Naturally, the forces of order perform numerous tasks. But, in the following pages, we will principally be concerned with the activities they undertake to prevent and repress criminality, and we will analyze how they have changed in recent decades. To what degree, we ask, do Italian police forces, with their particular history and the specificity of their organization, succeed in reaching this objective? How much have they known and do they know how to reduce or contain the number of crimes? More analytically, the principal questions we pose are two. First, has the degree of efficiency of law enforcement changed in the last twenty or thirty years, and if so (as has been frequently said), has it diminished? Secondly, has there been up until now a relationship between the number of police and the number of crimes, and is it true (as many citizens believe) that the increase of the one usually provokes the diminution of the other

Immigrants as authors and victims of crimes: the italian experience

Based upon data from the italian Ministry of Interior, this analysis describes trends in immigrant crime, the characteristics of offenders and victims of crime as well as their relationships, and the impact of the Italian policies for controlling illegal immigration. Methodology – Tabular analysis of government data. Findings – For many crimes in Italy, the percentage of all persons arrested who were immigrants increased substantially in the past two decades. The increases vary by nationality and probably reflect differences in demographic characteristics of the populations. Patterns of victimization are not what would be expected from the point of view of conflict theory but do strongly support the expectations of routine activities theory. Immigrants are at substantially higher risks of victimization than native Italians for several serious crimes, but their victimization is mostly likely to be done by co-nationals rather than by native Italians. Italian policies to locate and expel illegal immigrants within the country have been less efficient than expected. Value – This analysis demonstrates that immigration has had a substantial impact on crime in Italy. Although it does not address the question of whether immigrants are more inclined to commit crime than native Italians, it does show that when immigrants are victimized for certain crimes, it is usually done by co-nationals. It shows that the policies for the internal control of illegal immigration are less efficient than expected