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By Root 612 0

for?" (Che c'er' annat'a fd?~-although the heavy dialect usage probably owed more to the shopkeeper's sarcasm than to the officer's own speech. In my case, I had the solemn instructions of the investigating officer himself on my side, so, tongue in cheek (and feeling slightly irritated by the inconsistency I was meeting), I told the receiving officer that I was simply doing as I had been told. He called upstairs, and was evidently reassured that we had a legitimate reason for proceeding. When we finally began the process of lodging the complaint, it transpired that the easiest approach would be to use the officer's original report, the new copy of which I would then be asked to sign as though it had been written specially for this purpose, thereby transforming the text of the verbale into a genuine denuncia after all. This, then, was the important exercise in citizen responsibility that I had been asked to perform.

A paper copy was found, obviously printed from a computer-but apparently no file now existed on the computer itself, even though the incident had occurred only a few days earlier. So the officer painstakingly retyped the whole thing, word for word, and then asked me to sign it. In short, the original report and the famous denuncia were the same text, the only difference being that the second rendition was produced at my explicit request. The officer was then most annoyed when I asked him for a copy after he had printed out what he needed for his own purposes, as it seemed that he had not realized that he could easily print out another copy from the same file and had thought he might have to do the work yet one more time.2

Such incidents-my telling of this tale would thereafter always evoke knowing looks and a complete lack of surprise on the part of Italian friendsshow how bureaucratic rhythms effectively create collusion between criminals and the perhaps unwitting representatives of the law. These police officers were possibly being less stupid than wary of risks to their own standing; but they were certainly engaged in a process of sanctioned prevarication, putting ever more time between themselves and the unknown criminals. Even the special services created to protect the victims of usury do not act until a formal denuncia has been lodged with them, presumably for fear of being accused of prejudicial intervention. Thus, the law and the authorities' ostensibly reasonable desire to avoid wasting time on unproductive arrests combine to favor the crooks, which makes local residents more sympathetic to right-wing politics-a result that would certainly not displease some officers.

Performances of Policing

There are also situations in which, even after a persistent set of complaints, the police prefer not to bring charges at all, but engage in an elaborate charade of compliance with local demands for intervention against the most threatening category of outsiders-the immigrants from outside the European Union (extra comunitari). Both the poliziotti and the military carabinieri would frequently appear in the main square when there were heavy concentrations of these people-especially on Thursdays and Sundays, when the Ukrainians would gather in front of their cardinal's church and be joined by many Romanians, Albanians, and others-and harass them in unsubtle ways, pulling a few of them in and demanding to see their papers, or just watching them intently, but rarely doing much more than that. The local consensus was that most of these foreigners were in fact illegal immigrants.

I once noticed such a confrontation; when the policeman, who was operating from inside his car parked on a completely pedestrian area, had finished haranguing two Albanians, I approached them and asked them what had happened.' They said that they had been asked for their papers, of which they only had photocopies; they were allowed to leave, but were told they could not walk across the square but would have to leave by one of the side exits. I assured them that this was an illegal order and invited them for coffee in the bar of a man