Camera dei deputati, December 17, 1979. Leonardo Sciascia illustrated a Radical interpellation on the abuse of firearms by the police force engaged in road blocks.

("Single issue" booklet for the XXXV Congress of The Radical Party - Budapest 22-26 april 1989)

Mr. President, Members of Parliament, I well know I repeat, I too, after Cicciomessere and Mellini know how out of tune, inopportune, and inappropriate in the times we are going through, how contrary to the requests from all sides, as well as to the government measures that accept it, our interpellation will appear to many people. Nevertheless, it is necessary to make these assertions concerning freedom and rights, to confirm them, and to debate them, whatever the risk, even at the most unsuitable moments.

Perhaps it is equally out of place to remind the friends of the Left that I already affirmed the gist of what I am going to say at the time of the vote for the "Legge Reale", at a convention of the Communist Party in Palermo and also in the weekly "Rinascita". I then spoke of the "cries" which are mentioned in the first chapter of "I promessi sposi", whose increasing horror does not prevent the increase in audacity. However strange this may seem, I continue to think it in the same way: that giving the police more power, and the culprits a more severe punishment, will not cause the phenomenon of delinquency we are having to face to decrease in the very slightest. An opinion, so obvious however, that in Europe it has existed for at least two centuries, even if it still runs into stupid and interested resistance. But I shall not linger on the principles. Perhaps it would be better to give you what preachers call an "example" of what I want to say, here and now. When I go to the country, especially on

a Sunday, on the Palermo Agrigento road I always see police or "carabinieri" standing at a cross road or a layby, holding up a few cars and letting others pass without stopping them. I would already like to know what their criterion is for stopping some and letting others pass, whether it has to do with statistics or physionomy. But this is what worries me: that the three police men or carabinieri, since they are usually three, are completely unprotecteded as regards the cars which are arriving. And each time it occurs to me to make the following deduction: if in the cars which are going to stop there should be people with every motive not to want to be held up, a machine gun would mow all three of them down, without giving them time to react; while, if there were a distracted or inexperienced driver in the car, it would be the police who would have the time to aim and kill. This is why this paradox is true: that a criminal might succeed in passing unharmed, killing them, while a good citizen guilty o

f distraction or inexperience and nervousness, could easily be their victim.

Briefly, what I want to say is that the police doesn't need special laws, or greater and more arbitrary power, but good training, accurate instruction, and especially, intelligent direction. Special laws and greater power constitute demagogy and besides being useless are obviously dangerous for us citizens and for the police themselves. They are only the outlets that bad governments offer incapable police and which end being exercised more often on innocent citizens than on culprits. They are scornful gestures not only to all citizens, but in particular to those citizens who form the police force. Just as the Zanardelli code grants the more backward populations of the south the offence to honour, in the same way special laws grant to the backwardness of the police the possibility of the abuse and the undue use of weapons. I think that if these thirty years of democratic life have made any mark at all, that the police and carabinieri ought to feel offended rather than praised by this outlet granted to

them.

We do not want the forces of order, which we really would like to be such without having to show gratuitous force, to be bearers of an order that has nothing to do with violence, to be sent daily to disperse people. And personally, I feel that they should have at their disposal, adequate legal instruments which are appropriate to the circumstances, but which do not conflict with constitutional principles. But we are very concerned, and concerned for them also that there is a wish to give them the precept for emergency and civil war. In their place, rather than asking for the faculty of arrest with broad margins to arbitrate or to kill with impunity, I should ask and I would have the sacrosanct right what Judge Alessandrini meant when, in an interview a few days before being murdered, he asserted that the fight against terrorism should not be stopped by the sanctuaries of power.

This is the real knot to be untied, the real question that the police and carabinieri forces ought to ask and ask themselves: a police and body of carabinieri who do not want to be sent on a mission of useless sacrifice and who do not want to uselessly sacrifice inncocent citizens.