The Police, history of a very slow evolution

Through an extensive archival excavation, conducted by consulting first and foremost the papers of the Ministry of the Interior, Giovanna Tosatti reconstructs the history of the Italian State Police from the establishment of the General Directorate of Public Security on the Piedmontese model, in the aftermath of Unification, to the recent transformations, linked to European regulations. The analysis focuses above all on the reconstruction of the history of the administration.

Tosatti reflects on the long-term dynamics that have characterised the Italian police force, the hallmark of which, according to the author, lies in the 'authoritarian nature intrinsic to the institution from the outset, which has shown itself to be tenaciously impermeable even to alternating governments of different political persuasions'. An explicative example of this was the persistence in republican Italy of the 1931 Testo Unico, approved in the midst of fascism and dismantled, from time to time, only thanks to the sentences of the Constitutional Court.

What happens with other administrations occurs in the history of the police: the element of continuity prevails over that of rupture. As a result, institutional evolution, although present, is slow, and sometimes depends more on the urgency of the times (as in the case of the reforms following the events of the G8 in Genoa) or on exogenous stimuli rather than on organically prepared reforms.

Pages of great interest are devoted to the organisation of the information apparatus: from the large files of subversives devised in the Crispina era, to the OVRA 'zones' and the Political Police Division, up to the offices that operated in post-World War II Italy. In particular, the functioning of the Confidential Affairs Division is reconstructed, set up in 1948 and directed, first de facto and then officially, between 1960 and 1974 by the controversial Federico Umberto D'Amato, later involved, according to some judicial reconstructions, in the neo-fascist Bologna massacre.

In the immediate post-World War II period, the division functioned from the outset by making use of a network of foreign surveillance offices active in the area. It then underwent several changes, by successive Interior Ministers, showing itself permeable to pressure from the CIA. It seemed to act within that Office (and it would happen at various levels of the Public Administration) that 'double State', which played a decisive role in the strategy of tension and which, for the author, was, in the first place, functional to guarantee, to those who put it in place, the preservation of power.