the same as George Floyd (banned in some states)

On the night between 24 and 25 February, Matteo Falcinelli, a student from Spoleto at Florida International University, was arrested by Miami police officers in circumstances that raise serious concerns about the methods used by law enforcement. According to reports, Falcinelli was immobilized for 13 minutes in an extremely painful and dangerous position: on his stomach, with his hands (behind his back) tied to his feet with a nylon belt, a practice known as “hog-tie” in the United States and “hognettedness” in Italy. This arrest technique, in addition to evoking images of ancient and barbaric punishments, is considered by many experts to be a real method of torture.

The technique

Hog-tye or hogtieing falls under the so-called “maximum prone restraint” or “four-pronged restraint” practices, technical terms used to mitigate the impact of this practice in the popular imagination. In both English and Italian, there is a strong reference to the animal world: in America, in fact, this is the way in which farmers chained pigs (hogs) before killing them. The risks are multiple, such as that of positional asphyxiation, which is why the United States Department of Justice had already expressed concerns in 1995.

The risks

The incident in which George Floyd was the victim in 2020 in Minneapolis, suffocated during a similar arrest, has rekindled the debate on the use of such techniques, pushing some US states, such as California and the State of Washington, to completely ban their use. use. However, not all states and local authorities have followed this example. Miami, where Falcinelli’s arrest took place, is one of these. Many law enforcement agencies have independently banned its use, as in the case of New York and Los Angeles. Data collected by NBC reveal that at least twenty people in the United States have lost their lives due to brutal restraining techniques adopted by the police. Floyd’s death is only the most striking example of a much larger problem, which continues to claim lives and raise questions about arrest and restraint practices.

The Falcinelli case

Regarding the Falcinelli case, Amnesty International, through the spokesperson of the Italian section Riccardo Noury, defined the use of hogtieing as a form of illegal and unjustified treatment, which finds no justification in safety, especially when the immobilized person does not represent a immediate threat.

The Italian student, 25 years old from Spoleto, was thrown to the ground by the officers with his face on the asphalt and their knee on his neck. It happened in Miami Beach in a nightclub on the evening between February 24 and 25 but the young man only told his story now for fear of retaliation. From what we can see online in public police records, the boy would be guilty of trespassing on private property, resisting and assaulting a public official. The images of the violence on the evening of February 24th come from the body cams worn by the officers that the lawyer following the matter obtained from the prosecutor’s office only on April 12th.

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