Italians don’t feel safe anymore. Rising levels of petty crime and deprivation in some neighbourhoods and the increased immigrant presence in these areas have spurred residents and business people to band together and take the law into their own hands.

Particularly prolific in Italy’s industrialised North, where they often have direct links with the populist and anti-immigrant Northern League party (NL), citizen street patrols are also flourishing all over Italy. The trend began some years ago when Italians began to feel that their neighbourhoods were overrun with vandals, criminals and delinquents.

Increasingly xenophobic, citizen concern stems from the belief that local police are overly tolerant of delinquent activity, much of which is blamed on immigrants. The NL has capitalised on these fears to gain more public support. They promote the use and utility of citizen patrol groups as an effective way to boost community involvement, enforce conventional moral codes, protect communities and assert the right to self-preservation.

The NL now wants to take citizen patrols one step further by legalising them across Italy and giving civilians additional powers, and perhaps, even allowing them to carry weapons.

Enjoying auxiliary police powers and state funding, legalised vigilante groups would help protect public areas, and could be called to back up police. However, pundits argue that state funds should be used to fortify institutional forces, not citizen vigilante squadrons.

Opposition politicians, and even NL’s political allies, are alarmed over granting police-like powers to citizens, arguing that in the mafia-ridden South, vigilante groups would be manipulated by mobsters to secure their influence. Another doubt concerns accountability and safety: “Who would be responsible if vigilantes get hurt, or worse, die?” maintains Anchille Serra, former mayor of Rome.

Many fear outbreaks of individually enforced justice, a lack of ethical and regulatory guidelines and constitutional breaches. Opponents claim that citizens in Italy already have the power to arrest, making the legalisation of vigilante groups ineffectual in tackling crime.     

Many citizens think legalising vigilantes would be a waste of time and resources, too. A doctor from Verona thinks that rising crime levels need to be dealt with but doesn’t believe citizen patrols are the answer: “I don’t think legalising vigilante groups would make people feel safer; the state must guarantee public safety and security—not citizens. This proposal does the opposite and instead poses a very concrete risk to public safety”.        

A centre-right supporter from Padova, where several volunteer groups regularly carry out evening patrols in high-risk areas, admits that while citizen patrols may be empowering on an individual level, they should not be manipulated by political parties: “It is true that the best police force in a neighbourhood are the residents themselves, but private citizens cannot replace state police and use force or weapons to uphold the law and such groups cannot be like political parties. This is not volunteering anymore, but something much more serious.”    
 
The proposal to legalise vigilante groups is part of a series of law and order reforms, which are expected to get approval in the Senate next month. Other NL proposals that have raised debate include: requiring Muslim women to uncover their faces in public, denying entry to migrants for two years, forcing illegal immigrants to pay for public healthcare, requiring doctors to report illegal persons and a census of the country’s homeless.

Brenda Dionisi for RT