Drugs and gang fights, the security alarm that worries Palermo

Garages in Palermo have been very happy over the last few months: business has grown a lot, mainly due to the considerable influx of Panda's, the car most in demand by car thieves. And there is no difference by area or neighbourhood. It is the submerged aspect of perceived criminality in the Sicilian capital that goes beyond the official numbers, beyond the statistical data because car thefts respond to a very particular logic. That of the so-called return horse: the car is stolen, the owner starts to spread the word that he would be willing to recover it in some way, a friend of friends shows up with a request for money, he pays and gets the car back. Fearing they will try again, he looks for a garage and goodnight.

And often, very often, they do not deny having paid money to get their car back. There are 14 citizens who risk prosecution for aiding and abetting for denying, despite wiretaps proving otherwise, that they paid a gang in the Sperone, a neighbourhood to the east of the city, to get their car back. What can I say. And that of car thefts, if you like, is just one aspect of a more complex situation that is weighing heavily on the city: in some neighbourhoods, and especially in Ballarò, drugs are flowing like wildfire, especially crack cocaine. The feeling, at times, is that we have gone back to the 1980s, to the tragic years of the heroin epidemic that left so many dead and made the Mafia gangs rich. And today we see the zombies again, as the local newspaper reports unfortunately often do: increasingly young boys addicted to crack. Willing to do anything just to get a few euros to buy more. but that is not all. In some of the streets of the city centre, restaurateurs are now at the point of exasperation: 'Crack has entered the city and is claiming victims among young and old. It turns them into zombies, makes them criminals: they steal everything that can be sold in exchange for a fix. Via Ricasoli has become a drug den. They do crack from morning to night,' Ugo Diliberto, who runs a lounge bar on Via La Lumia, a stone's throw from the Politema Theatre, wrote on Facebook. 'The decline in these six years has been unstoppable, from Covid onwards it has been worse and worse. It is frightening for us who manage the premises in the area and for our customers who frequent them'. The area in which Diliberto's lounge bar is located has already been at the centre of some very serious incidents: last year, at the height of a fight, a 30-year-old man fired seven shots from a 9-calibre pistol, and a few months later a murder took place in a nearby discotheque. "They fight among themselves, every night there is a fight: once one of them was even stabbed for the division of territory, in short, there is no control. I'm not asking for a siege, but I am asking for a fixed patrol, which would be absolutely necessary. This is a cross-section of a city in which the statistic is hardly accepted by citizens who have a much higher perception of violence. And it is hard to believe that the Palermo gangs, though weakened, are not aware of everything that goes on in neighbourhoods like Vucciria or Borgo Vecchio. Not to mention the suburbs: Borgo Nuovo, Cep, Cruillas, Brancaccio, 'I can feel and perceive the sense of insecurity manifested by the citizens, but we have to ask ourselves what is happening in Italy and in all the metropolitan cities,' said the mayor of Palermo Roberto Lagalla, interviewed in the talk 'Metropolis Sicilia'. 'The phenomenon we are concerned with is not a phenomenon that concerns only Palermo'. And Quaestor Maurizio Calvino, for his part, reiterates: 'I have never dismissed the problems, I will not do so this time either, saying that the issue of security related to malamovida concerns all large metropolitan areas equally,' he says. At the moment there is a perception of security that is not the welcome one, it is the facts that impose this on us, to deny it would be like putting our heads in the sand. But I am sorry that the enormous efforts made by the police to make the city quieter are also not perceived. A complex job, we deal with it day and night'.