Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [152]
Some of the most feared city police officers are themselves women; they are feared because they are exigent, both in their bureaucratic pedantry and in their presumed capacity to extort bribes, and it is not always easy to distinguish between these two aspects of their operating style. Unlike most of the carabinieri, the city officers, both men and women, are tough, sardonic Roman citizens, so deeply implicated in local reciprocities that for a time the civil authorities required that their patrols always be monitored by a pair of carabinieri.
This surveillance followed a locally familiar idiom. A powerful sense of shared responsibility for keeping an eye on the streets, a stance that even in Monti is now thought to be fraying beyond repair, was still such that, for example, one man reported that the greengrocer near his house kept an eye on the nanny to whom he entrusted his little child. Trust exists because of, not in spite of, the collective surveillance of and by the community; it does not spring from a presumption of innate personal reliability but from the certain knowledge that social pressure is the only force that can ensure an honest performance. Thus, the government chooses to impose a system of mutual checking on the various police forces because mutual suspicion is the only possible basis for creating the conditions for mutual trust-a social guarantee rather than an interpersonal pact. On this basis, too, I was told that if one wished to make a complaint against, say, the carabinieri, one could only report to the polizia. In practice, most people would just let the matter pass; but the possibility itself follows a social logic that everyone understands.
No love is lost among the various forces. This may be a good thing; some believe that it was this tension, for example, that prevented the carabinieri from joining elements in the national civilian police in an attempted coup in 1974; this, said a neighbor, "saved democracy in Italy." Because they have technically different jurisdictions and functions, mutual harassment is far from rare, and officers of each force are reluctant to pass up opportunities for scoring points. In one incident, some city police slapped fines on a group of carabinieri for a minor offense. The latter immediately sought revenge. Dressed in civilian clothes, they followed the city officers into a bar and overheard them attempting to extract bribes from the owner; and then they pounced. A local councilor remarked, "Those guys were compromised, and so [the carabinieri] denounced them!"
The carabinieri are supposedly held to a military code of honor; nonetheless, I encountered two former carabinieri as well as a former member of the polizia, all of whom quit their respective forces because, allegedly, they were disgusted by the depths of corruption they had encountered.' As one of the former carabinieri remarked, "If you don't help others 'eat,' you can't make out yourself either" (se non fai mangiare, non mangi)-a remark that may also indirectly suggest that those who quit are disgusted less by the rampant corruption than by their personal failure to profit from it.
The miasma of corruption is indeed so pervasive, and so expected, that no group or individual escapes the suspicion, at least, of taking bribes and breaking petty laws; the reality of their corruption is immaterial when everyone assumes it. A clerk in the city administration whose task was to find homes for those who had suffered eviction told me not to reveal the nature of her employment