It was inevitable: now Carmelo Cinturrino, the policeman who shot the pusher Abderrahim Mansour in the Rogoredo area of ​​Milan, is “the rotten apple”. After being described as the man in uniform who deserved applause “without ifs or buts”, after having received explicit and unconditional solidarity from the Presidency of the Council, the Ministry of the Interior and self-adjunct lieutenant Minister of Infrastructure and Transport, when the truth of a staging, of a voluntary murder, probably multi-aggravated, clumsily disguised as self-defense, the buck-passing becomes an Olympic specialty, even in the city that has just archived the Olympics with good success.

The gun that came out of nowhere and 22 inexplicable minutes: this is how the Cinturrino castle collapsed

It took less than a month to go from the heartfelt and rhetorical defense of a hero who had to defend himself from the drug dealer armed with a (toy) gun to the embarrassed silence, to the trembling distinctions, up to the pathetic celebrations of a system capable of denouncing and isolating him. Naturally, overlooking the fact that – if half of the things we are reading on Cinturrino really turned out to be true – we would have to wonder where “the system” was, until the day before yesterday.

A hasty and populist legislative power

But we are guaranteed and not from today, here, and moreover what he confessed is enough to make us shudder, without waiting to see ascertained what his colleagues and subordinates are confessing for him, now that the omelette is done, a man has been killed, and the credibility of the police has been severely affected. In hindsight, however, it is instructive to see that episode, that murder, for what it meant for those who govern the country. As if there really weren’t very serious problems to deal with from Palazzo Chigi, it was the opportunity to badly exercise, riding an emergency that didn’t exist – and wouldn’t have existed even if Cinturrino’s had been a legitimate defense – a hasty and populist legislative power. On 26 January Cinturrino kills Mansour in Rogoredo. On January 31st in Turin there is a demonstration for Askatasuna, with violent attacks on members of the police force. On February 6, on the opening day of the Winter Olympics, the Meloni government approves the new, yet another, security decree, containing among other things the norms on the “criminal shield”, a confusing legal device that places on the shoulders of the public prosecutor the responsibility of deciding whether there is a clear need to defend oneself, on the part of those who have injured or perhaps killed, by registering them in a mysterious special register, which in any case will have to be established with a further law not yet discussed or approved.

No criminal shield at the moment

There is no criminal shield at the moment, and thank goodness: and it is very likely that if it were ever established there would be some verification by the Constitutional Court. However, a political fact remains: the Rogoredo-Turin one-two punch builds an excellent basis for the political narrative that pushes the government first to declare with one voice that it is with the police, and then to legislate to declare to Italy that Giorgia Meloni’s government is with the police. Only this time the propaganda hit the wall of reality, a magistrate and the investigators remained a bit like this, when they read this story of the toy gun, probably someone like Cinturrino had stepped on a few toes, around the city, and so what seemed like the “perfect” story for the propaganda of the government’s right turns into the classic banana peel on which you slip, step on your buttocks, and spend some time before see the hematoma absorbed.

The story has some political implications, perhaps greater than one might think. In the suburban streets, in the town bars, we heard someone noise, they didn’t seem like Elly Schlein fans. Who knows if it might be another brick laid on the ground paving the suddenly bumpy road that leads the majority to the constitutional referendum at the beginning of spring. But it is right and proper to leave this suburban affair where it happened, to bring it back to its history: in a symbolic place of the Milan that did not make it, that of the Rogoredo drug forest, within a slightly broader geographical and political trajectory. Ten days before the inauguration ceremony of the Olympics, a stone’s throw from where we were racing “against time” to be ready for the inauguration of the Ice Hockey Arena, in the drug grove of Rogoredo life continued as if nothing had happened. A beautiful metaphor for things that happen more and more often in successful cities: very different lives are lived within a kilometer as the crow flies. On the wrong side, we survive on common crimes or die badly for the crimes committed by someone else: who sometimes even wears a uniform. Hopefully, no shield. And in any case, without excuses.