Policing and urban control in Rome and Milan: A view from the Southern edge of Europe

In this chapter we describe and discuss the politics of policing in the two biggest Italian cities, Rome and Milan. The empirical focus of this intra-national comparison is on formulation of policy agendas for policing, seeking to differentiate sub-national from national variation in policing, and context-dependent characteristics from any macro-tendencies (Edwards and Prins 2014: 405-411). The two cities’ agendas are analysed for the last 7 years (2007-2014), a period characterized in Italy by remarkable financial and economic pressures on public bodies, with cutbacks that affected the police system as well as many other public – and mostly local – services (see Selmini, and Edwards in this volume), by increasing centralization (Calaresu 2013, 2016ab), and by an extension of punitive measures and crime controls at the urban level (Selmini in this volume). In our analysis we consider whether, and how, Rome and Milan were affected by these changes and whether, and how, they dealt with them differently.