27 Jun 2024 1.45pm
by Federica Porfidi
Provincial Secretary of the Italian Left – Terni
Walking around the city and reading the newspapers that report a succession of episodes of attacks on women, small fights in the neighborhoods, repeated thefts with break-ins in shops, attacks in prison on the police and the judiciary, one feels a sense of new insecurity and progressive decline that is not usual for a citizen of Terni. Maybe it is because of the passing of the years but one could almost say ‘Terni mia non sì più tu’ quoting a famous song from the Maggiano.
Yet the administrations that won the last elections in Terni had based their electoral campaign on these very issues. The Latini administration had also won on the emotional wave of the dramatic murder of David Raggi, describing a city in dark colors prey to crime and placing the blame on the incumbent mayor. Today the new mayor who replaced Latini has taken on the issue of security head on with a true sheriff’s attitude, has kept the delegation to the Local Police and has even hired private security guards from Unicusano (!), and no one has yet understood what they do.
So what is it that hasn’t worked? Why is the city even more unsafe than 8 or 9 years ago? It’s that everything else has been eliminated! Prevention is lacking, services are lacking, social control of the territory is lacking and, at the end of the day, everything falls on the shoulders of a few people in charge of order and security who find themselves unable to manage a constantly growing chaos and concern.
Let’s see what happened. Our city until a few years ago was characterized by a rich and vital associative fabric. Mayor Latini as a first move to prevent the growing youth discomfort closed the aggregation centers and eliminated the offices where a good part of the socio-cultural associations voluntarily operated, just in these days he is returning the keys Palmetta after a strenuous and courageous resistance. Combining the ‘prevention of youth discomfort’ with the closure of social spaces, is not only the result of an obvious political short-sightedness, it is also the constant and conscious choice of these right-wing parties to make citizens more alone and isolated.
The constituencies, which represented a very strong presence in the neighborhoods, have been eliminated and not replaced by other forms of territorial participation of citizens and the citizenship offices, where the municipal social services should operate, have been reduced from 9 to 3, and those closed more important in the most difficult and marginal neighborhoods.
We are witnessing the constant cancellation of our spaces for participation, when instead we all need to safeguard them, strengthen them and multiply them also as a concrete response to that need for proximity that our community needs. Even the local retail network has been humiliated by the continuous opening of new peripheral and central shopping centers which have made the city center and the streets of the neighborhoods a desert of lowered shutters. Small shops that constitute the economic and working fabric of many citizens, but also sociality and exchange and social control, because we know well that the streets, neighborhoods and safe squares are created by the people who live and populate them.
Furthermore, the territorial impact of the expansion of the city prison which went to High Security should be analysed, without the municipal administrations being interested in what impact it would have had on the city. The services of the associations that operated inside, in collaboration with the municipal administration, were cancelled. There is no longer any form of internal external connection that supports, but also monitors, the network of visiting family members who increasingly also become resident citizens of our city. Prison itself is a place where recovery and socio-work integration initiatives are now lacking and the rate of aggression and discomfort increases in a situation where treatment activities are put on the back burner and everything ends up falling, as in the city, on the few police operators Penitentiary and on socio-educational and health services which are not equipped with staff and funds to treat the problems of drug addiction or the growing situations of mental distress and social abandonment present, which once the sentence is over fall back into the territory without having been resolved.
Even for migrant citizens, integration activities are residual and related to the reception services for refugees who have recently arrived in the city, while all those initiatives of protagonism and dialogue with the resident migrant communities are abandoned, to encourage participation in city life that would simultaneously represent listening, mutual recognition and responsibility with respect to collective life and common construction of services and rules of coexistence. It is therefore a completely failed model that is being experienced on our skin and that of the city that must be completely revolutionized.
Creating a city where social problems remain unanswered and believing that it is sufficient to hire new municipal police officers, forgetting to hire educators or entertainers, to resolve everything with complaints to the courts is truly ridiculous and it is clear that it does not work. The opposite must be done. Investing in the prevention of all these problems to leave law enforcement and courts free from having to replace social workers to instead deal with organized crime which seems increasingly active also in money laundering and land grabs and its activities economical.
We propose to open a reflection in the city on these issues, calling for discussion of the social and economic forces in the coming months to build an alternative, also in the wake of the new experiences that we know will be built in Perugia with the new mayor Vittoria Ferdinandi. We of the Italian Left have had a clear path for some time and, as in the document that came out of the congress, we reiterate that ‘if sometimes we feel like a city besieged by barbarians at the gates, it is necessary to understand that the walls should not be defended, but torn down, to launch together with the besiegers the assault on the castle of the lords’.
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