Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [150]
Such saucy insouciance is a Roman's best protection against the systemic indifference represented by the foot-dragging tactics of the police bureaucracy. When the authorities do choose to act, the popular presumption is not that they are performing their civic duty, but that they are either violating the norms of social civility-a tacit agreement not to interfere-or retaliating against an uncivil response to their own rhythms of action and conventional hints about what it would take to buy them off. Just as a local boss might make an example of someone who repeatedly offended against his authority, so people assume, police officers-especially the city vigili- must occasionally make an example of those who do not understand the system of mutual accommodation that permits the continuing exchange of favors.
There are, to be sure, important exceptions to this pattern of complaisance. Many Italians take pride, for example, in the sometimes spectacular successes of the special section of the carabinieri responsible for the recovery of stolen art; in a country where the official line is that it possesses "seventy percent" of the world's great masterpieces,7 such activities are both sacrosanct and entirely admirable defenses against foreign rapacity and internal treachery. But in general recourse to the law is considered neither socially acceptable nor pragmatically effective; the denuncia is valued more as an instrument of social management than as an effect prompt for official action. Moreover, the representatives of the law, being no less subject to the logic of original sin than are ordinary mortals, can be and are expected to engage in the ordinary reciprocities of Roman life to an extent sometimes actually facilitated by the cover that their uniforms and official titles afford them.
Police foot-dragging takes place in a larger context of accommodation between official practices and the established habits of local people. Illegality is rife and is not considered abnormal. One of the most respected trades, for examples, is that of the jewelers and goldsmiths; yet many of them, possibly more than half of those operating in all of Rome, work without permits. Like all merchants and artisans, they must shape two entirely different budgets. One is the official response to state accounting requirements (la contabilitd). The other is a social accounting, and it is significantly different. It should include bribes (mazzette) to be paid to a wide variety of officials, from tax inspectors to city policemen and even service workers; ironically, for many artisans and merchants it also includes expected fines, which for many locals are really thinly disguised bribes anyway-one greengrocer calculated that his annual budget for fines was around i,ooo,ooo lire and that this was an acceptable amount. An itinerant vendor got a ticket for driving a damaged vehicle (his windshield had been smashed in an accident); through the parking attendant (posteggiatore) at one of the markets where he sells his wares, he claims to have transmitted a bribe of 150,000 lire (of which the attendant raked off 30000 for his services as mediator) that saved him a fine of 6oo,ooo lire instead. Here again precise calculation is possible: "It's an established price list!" (E tariffa ormai!)
Fractured Authority: The Multiplicity of Policing
The police forces display a breathtaking variety. There are the carabinieri, the city police, the uniformed tax officials, and the polizia. It is pointless to request the services of one group if the particular issue falls under the jurisdiction of any of the other three. Time, too,