Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [95]
Indeed, most such reports produce little action and may create problems later on. A woman who filed a report about a robbery and replaced all her personal documents was then surprised to receive all the stolen documents, neatly packaged in an envelope. She did not feel capable of pursuing the matter further: "I'm not sufficiently Italian to do such things," she observed, revealing an association in her own perspective between being culturally Italian and preferring the civil to the civic has, indeed, the thief had certainly been remarkably civil!). So she went to the police to ask for advice and was told to destroy the whole set of new documents in their presence; no one wanted the bother of processing them all over again, and the thief had kept his side of an implicit bargain and did not deserve to be persecuted further. He was now, ironically, protected by the original denuncia against him, a virtual guarantee of inaction. Her husband later remarked that she should simply have thrown the old set into the garbage container and kept quiet.
In reality the effect of the requirement that the citizen formulate a denuncia in order for action to occur at all is a device that effectively absolves the authorities of any pressing urge to investigate. It provides an internal control so that a commanding officer who encounters too many discrepancies between citizens' complaints and the reports filed by a particular officer can call the latter to account. But most people claim that the requirement really serves the officers' own interests, especially in the breach; without such a document, they have every reason to do nothing at all. On the other hand, once they have insisted on having the citizen file a complaint, they can also claim to have completed all the necessary bureaucratic procedures, beyond which further action is now their business rather than that of the injured citizen-and is thus also immune from the citizen's inspection.
The denuncia thereby also provides what a retired journalist described to me as a "self-defense." Suspects can bring charges of defamation against any journalist who dares to suggest that they have done anything wrong, even if the journalist has good evidence; the inaction of the authorities itself becomes the effective basis of the suspects' public claim to innocence. The journalist cited as an example the case of Archbishop Giordano of Naples, accused of having fixed up a network of usury with the connivance of a bank manager, and claimed that no one ever spoke of the case any more.8 The denuncia can also backfire against the plaintiff. A jeweler who resisted demands for kickbacks (tangenti~ and reported the crime, for example, was not offered any protection by the authorities, but instead was advised by a senior carabinieri officer to shut down his shop on the grounds that the alternative would have been an endless series of acts of sabotage. In situations such as this, public officials effectively connive-whether intentionally or otherwise-in maintaining a climate of fear.
The assumption that police indifference constitutes a practical declaration of immunity for wrongdoers thus provides a reinforcement of underworld fearmongering, the goal of which in turn is to discourage citizens from speaking out. Moreover, one did not gratuitously report "the butcher" or "the carpenter" because these were members of a social order in which mutual protection (ricambio) was assured among people who would only introduce themselves by a first name and who would never expect or offer a receipt for a small local purchase. Outsiders, by contrast, were considered legitimate victims of both criminal attacks-mostly theft and extortion-and denunciation to the authorities. Outsiders could also be cheated; neighbors, almost never. There was much disgust at an antiques dealer who boasted of selling sixteen fake pictures, not to a "person who was just passing through," but to a neighbor who was also a regular customer. Other social factors also underscore the contextual nature of business ethics here: a clothes dealer,