The Italian government is planning two new security measures: a decree law "containing urgent provisions for the operational and organizational strengthening of the Ministry of the Interior and the police force" and a bill "on public safety, immigration and international protection, as well as the functionality of the police force and the Ministry of the Interior." The news was leaked immediately after the serious news event in La Spezia, where a student killed a classmate with a knife.
This is no coincidence, but a now structural governing technique: the news as an emotional shock, the exception as the foundation of the norm, the individual act transformed into justification for a general and permanent intervention. Violence is not understood, but exploited. Its material causes are not examined, but rather used to reinforce order.The two measures come just a few months after yet another security decree (April 2025) and two years after the so-called "Decreto della Repubblica" (Decreto della Repubblica). The Caivano Decree marks the first step in an openly punitive reform of juvenile justice. This legislative continuum does not address real emergencies, but rather constructs a permanent emergency, serving the expansion of the state's repressive power.
Security Versus Rights: A Political Reversal
The legislative package introduces a coherent set of measures that impact public order, criminal law, migration governance, and the strengthening of the powers and prerogatives of law enforcement.
The two texts complement each other and contribute to redefining the relationship between security, prevention, and guarantees, shifting the focus of public intervention toward anticipating the repressive system. This is a deliberate political choice.
Security thus becomes an ideological device that legitimizes repressive anticipation and neutralizes social conflict by treating it as pathology.
Selective Cities: Red Zones, DASPOs, and Urban Segregation
In terms of public order, the core of the reform is the expansion of administrative powers of prevention. The possibilities for limiting access to and permanence in urban spaces are being expanded through the extension of "urban DASPOs" and the introduction of so-called enhanced surveillance zones, the "red zones."
The expansion of the red zones and the DASPOs represent a true turning point: extraordinary administrative measures that produce widespread and long-lasting restrictions on fundamental rights.
Here, it is not crimes that are repressed, but presumed dangers. The city is divided into legitimate spaces and prohibited spaces, traversable only by those who are compliant, productive, and harmless. Security translates into administrative segregation. Urban space is rewritten as a conditioned territory. Presence becomes legitimate only if invisible or economically useful. Everything else is excess to be governed.
Added to this are preventive searches, preventive detentions, increased controls during public demonstrations, the expansion of video surveillance, and the introduction of biometric identification systems. Control is no longer limited to repression: it anticipates, filters, and selects.
It is a measure that directly targets dissent, as demonstrated by the proceedings initiated against the "propal" protesters, who have been subjected to multiple preventive measures simply for participating in a protest unwelcome by government forces.
Internal Enemies: Minors, Migrants, Protesters
While one of the measures aims to strengthen law enforcement agencies and careers, the other has already been dubbed the "anti-maranza" decree: a term that reveals more than it purports to conceal. The relentless criminalization of recent years has produced precisely that image of the youth enemy that is now being branded as an emergency.
Minors and young people become the advanced laboratory of this security policy. Extensive warnings, sanctions against parents, arrests, and precautionary measures, even for minors. No investment in education and prevention.
Discomfort is treated as guilt. Fragility as danger. Minors as "maranza," risk categories to be neutralized. Here, prevention is completely emptied of its social meaning and transformed into a police measure. We don't intervene in the material conditions of conflict, but we anticipate control over bodies deemed at risk. We don't prevent the damage: we prevent the subject.
Through these new measures, the paradigm of internal enemies is definitively sealed. Minors, foreigners, protesters, conflicting subjects: no longer bearers of rights, but bearers of risk. Control is no longer about what one does, but about who one is. Identity becomes a police category.
More crimes, fewer judges: repression without trial
On the criminal front, the package leads to widespread tightening: increased penalties for property crimes, extension of the right to deferred arrest, transformation of carrying knives from a misdemeanor to a felony, and introduction of the crime of fleeing from a police stop sign.
At the same time, certain offenses related to demonstrations are decriminalized and replaced with extremely high administrative fines, imposed directly by the police. This is the case, for example, with the provision of Article 18 of the Consolidated Law on Public Safety, which currently provides for a criminal offense for promoters of a demonstration without prior notification to the public safety authorities, and Article 24 of the same Consolidated Law, which punishes those who, during a demonstration, fail to comply with the order to disperse the police. These provisions have been difficult to enforce in court. Transforming these into administrative offenses will instead lead to the immediate application of a fine of up to EUR20,000, thus more effectively and repressively limiting the right to demonstrate.
This is a key step: fewer judges, more police; fewer guarantees, more discretion. Repression is not diminishing: it is being reorganized.
Borders and Cage: Migration as a Police Issue
On the migration front, the package further restricts the scope for rights: the ban on territorial waters, accelerated repatriations, reduction of subsidiary protection, introduction of the concept of a safe third country to limit requests for political asylum, limitations on access to justice, and the dismantling of free legal aid. Here, too, the answer is always the same: more power to the executive, fewer rights for individuals.
A more armed state, a more fragile society
If approved, these measures will accentuate the imbalance between guarantees and the use of force. What emerges is a paradigm shift: a state that abandons understanding conflict and chooses to manage it through the police; a state that governs society not through rights and guarantees, but through control and repressive anticipation.
Security as order, as conformity, as the silencing of dissent becomes the guiding principle of public action. And if we continue at this rate, soon the few remaining guarantees and rights will disappear entirely.
Eugenio Losco - Criminal Lawyer in Milan
https://umanitanova.org/governare-la-paura-ennesimo-pacchetto-sicurezza/
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Link: (en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova #4-26 - Mastering Fear. Yet Another Security Package (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]
Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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