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?