“Mr. Lieutenant” thirty years later: the police are no longer Faletti’s heroes
“And we are tired of putting up with what happens in this country, where we have to get killed for just over a million a month” sang Giorgio Faletti in Sanremo in ’94, winning second place and the Critics’ Award with a powerful tribute to the police, veterans of mafia massacres, threatened by a climate of blood and fear that put their lives at risk every day. Today, thirty years later, that song sounds like an ancient fairy tale and not for the old-fashioned salary. What is no longer there are not only the liras (the pay slips, however, have remained the same), but also – and above all – the idea and consideration of those currencies.
There are no longer the heroes that Faletti so heartfeltly described, “those murdered boys thrown in the air like a rag, fallen to the ground like people, who were torn to pieces with explosives”. And there are no longer even those who stand up to applaud emotionally, in front of a stage or on TV. On the other hand, there are carabinieri who in Milan rammed a moped with two twenty-year-old boys on board who did not stop, killing one of them; there are entire departments and teams of policemen who in Genoa attack at night a school where media activists involved in the G8 are sleeping, brutally beating them and sending an English journalist into a coma; there are other carabinieri who in Rome severely beat a 31-year-old surveyor who had just arrived at the barracks after a drug search, who died a week later as a result of the beatings; there is a road agent who fires two gunshots on the A1 towards the Autogrill Badia al Pino, near Arezzo, on the other side of the road 50 meters away, hitting and killing a 26 year old boy , a Lazio fan, who with his friends in the car is going to an away match in Milan.
A tug of war without winners
Facts that have covered the uniforms with shame and overturned the collective imagination in recent years, which no longer sees those who wear them with that admiring and grateful look, but fears them, observes them with judgement, questions them or worse still despises them . In this new climate, a feeling of intolerance and mistrust towards the police forces has grown, which seems to have reached its peak, almost to the point of legitimizing blind violence in the squares, among the marches, as if it were a competition to see who will charge first. As if throwing a stone at a policeman is nothing more than anticipating a truncheon.
A tug of war without winners, where common sense and often also dignity are the losers. And if mocking those uniforms was once “joke humor” – always quoting Faletti – today there are certain unacceptable behaviors, both of those who show them off and of those who don’t respect them. The boundary between the various responsibilities can be so blurred that sometimes not even justice is able to trace it – unfortunately (and this is another great defeat) – but instead of fighting over who is wrong and who is right, over who “if is deserved” and who “did their duty,” we should begin to ask ourselves who we have become and why. Both on one side of the ‘barricade’ and on the other. “Minchia” (cit).