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CRIME

On patrol with Rome police: how safe is the Eternal City?

Just how safe is Rome? Journalist John Henderson goes on patrol on a Saturday night with two policemen to find out.

On patrol with Rome police: how safe is the Eternal City?
Gerardo Mastrangelo (L) and Gian Cristian Salimbene before their Saturday night shift. Photo: John Henderson

About 75 percent of all businesses in Italy are family run, meaning three out of every four Italian boys know what they’ll do when they grow up by the time they’re old enough to count change.

Gian Cristian Salimbene was different. Growing up in Turin, he didn’t want to work in a factory like his father. He wanted to be a policeman. He wanted it for the usual noble reasons. He wanted to help people. He wanted to keep people from hurting other people. In his three years on Rome’s police force, he has never fired a gun. He has never heard a gun fired. Neither has his partner, Gerardo Mastrangelo, who joined the force about the same time.

That tells you something about Rome. It tells you something about how safe it is and how safe any city is when guns are nearly impossible to legally acquire.

I met Salimbene and Mastrangelo at the police station across the Tiber River from the Stadio Olimpico (Olympic Stadium). It was Saturday night and I was going on my second police ride around Rome, the first time being 14 years ago.

On that occasion, one police officer had been on the force for 17 years and had never pulled his gun. That evening was as uneventful as a stroll through a city park. We descended on an apartment where a mentally disturbed youth was already apprehended after he pulled a knife on his father. We checked the documents of a trans- prostitute. About the most tense moments I saw were three Russian tourists, who refused to pay for a cheese plate because they didn’t like the cheese. Watching this big burly policeman explain the properties of individual Italian cheeses to Russian tourists was remarkable insight into how Italian men are in touch with their own culture.

Salimbene and Mastrangelo were going to further impress upon me the safety of my adopted city. I’ve always been fascinated by the soft underbelly of tourist towns. What’s it like behind the back-lit monuments, art galleries and romantic piazzas? Where’s the graft? The violence? The danger?

Growing up in America, you can find that in any city. Every metropolitan area in the U.S. has neighborhoods where guns are rampant and murder is common. According to City-Data.com, for the last 10 years, Detroit, a city of 700,000 people, has averaged 345 murders. Oakland, California, (population 404,000) has averaged 106, Baltimore (population 622,000) 234.

Rome's Termini station. Photo: Filippo Monteforte/AFP

According to the Rome police department records and reports on Ansa, Italy’s wire service, Rome, with a population of 2.6 million, has averaged 30.

“The centre of Rome is full of police, military, Carabinieri,” Salimbene tells me.

“People from other countries, like Brazil, tell me that you are not able to walk on the street during the night in those cities like in Brazil. They can rob you.”

In America, gun laws that aren’t much stricter than laws against chewing tobacco, have turned the country into a war zone.

Two years ago, guns killed 33,169 people in America, 21,175 by suicide. Italy had only 475 total homicides.

For two years Salimbene worked for an import company in Manhattan. New York has remarkably cleaned up its streets but the gun laws came as a shock to an Italian such as Salimbene.

“It’s something they need to review,” he says. “They need to understand better. There are two controversial rights: one, they say, ‘OK, we need to defend ourselves from people who commit crimes’ and on the other side there are people who use guns. It’s easy to get shot if many people carry guns. It’s too easy.”

Salimbene and Mastrangelo are standing inside the high walls of the station gate. A small watch tower stands on the corner looking out over the leafy middle-class neighborhood. A long line of about 35 turquoise police cars await the signal to take off on night patrols. They both are extremely fit. Their tight polo shirts emphasize strong physiques. Salimbene, 31, is from Turin and moved to Rome three years ago. Mastrangelo, 28, hails from Salerno, just north of the Amalfi coast, and came to Rome after serving in the army. Both seem to love their job.

“I’ve always dreamt about it,” Salimbene says in excellent English. “I could have become a priest. You have something inside you and just want to do it. It’s about the adrenaline. It’s about the kind of work you do: you do something good for society, for other people. You arrest people. You bust criminals.”

Suddenly a horn sounds. Everyone piles into their cars and takes off. If sirens were blaring it would look like we were responding to a terrorist attack. Then Salimbene says something that reminds me I’m in Italy.

“First, we take a coffee,” he says.
 

The break outside Caffe Oppio. Photo: John Henderson

I climb in the back seat after waving off Salimbene’s warning that the seat is uncomfortable. I’m 6-foot-3. I’m used to tight quarters in cars, airplanes, buses. This seat, however, is a torture chamber. It’s made of hard plastic with so little leg-room I must spread my knees against the back of the front seat like a yoga instructor. A piece of hard plastic, serving no apparent purpose but to dig into the passenger’s spinal column, sticks out from the back of my seat.

“You were right about this seat,” I say.

“It’s designed that way,” Salimbene responds. “It’s for prisoners. So they can’t move around back there.”

We pull up on Via Nicola Salvi, the street hovering over the Colosseum where the last free parking space was seen sometime around 1975. Mastrangelo stops right next to another parked car and we get out.

“That’s a good part of the job,” he says with a smile.

We go into Caffe Oppio, one of my favourite bars in Rome. It’s where you can sit outside and have reasonably priced drinks and look across the street at the 2,000-year-old Colosseum, back lit in all its historic glory. After about 6pm, the tourists leave and in their place are neighbourhood locals — plus a gaggle of police officers getting caffeinated for the night.

I ask Salimbene about a common topic of conversation among locals, both Romans and expats alike. Has Italy’s wave of immigration increased crime in the city? Italy’s immigrant population has reached 9.5 percent.

“Yes,” he says. “Stealing. Robberies. Crimes related to violence. Drugs. Most of the people we arrest are from other countries. I’d say 85 percent.”

He doesn’t say it maliciously. He doesn’t pepper his explanation with racist epithets as I’ve heard American officers talk about their jobs. It was straight matter of fact. In truth, whether it’s immigrants or not, Rome does have its fair share of crime outside of murders. Two years ago Rome had 513 car thefts and 4,150 robberies. 

Nowhere does Rome leave a bigger stain on the police blotter than pickpockets. It’s No. 2 in the world behind Barcelona, chalking up 1,848 in 2014.

I ask Salimbene his favourite part of the job.

“I like to understand new things, new ways of how to use the law,” he says. “I like to know my city better, know the people and all the characteristics of people and areas. It’s about using the law with people even if they don’t commit crimes. You start to have a lot of knowledge.”

After the coffee, we jump back into the car and head out. We head toward Piazza del Popolo, taking the narrow pedestrian entrance that once was the arch where the victorious Roman armies marched through. 

Tonight’s patrol is Tuscolana, a lower middle-class neighbourhood in southeast Rome. It’s one of the more dangerous places in the city but you wouldn’t know it driving up and down Via Tuscolana as we do this Saturday night. It’s lined with trees, small retail shops, a gaming house, a popular pub. It could pass for any neighborhood in Rome.

I ask Salimbene what’s the most dangerous neighbourhood in the city.

“Tor Bella Monaca,” he says without hesitation. “We send two or three cars from our station there every night.”

I tell him about the three-part series I did in January on Rome’s most notorious neighborhood nine miles east of the Termini train station. I cruised at night when my local guide, visibly nervous, wouldn’t even let me step out of the car to take a picture. I interviewed the Canadian-Italian bar owner a day before a car smashed through his front window and robbed the place. I interviewed a recovering junkie who’d spent 15 years years in nine different prisons and still lives there.

“You see,” Salimbene says. “Even in Rome there are areas that aren’t safe.”

We head down Via Tuscolana for the first of so many times I practically memorize the business names. Suddenly, the police dispatcher calls out something and Mastrangelo steps on the gas. We’re going 100 kilometres per hour (60 mph) through side streets trying to reach an old man who is disoriented and lost.

You’ve heard of crazy Italian drivers? Italian police officers seem crazy when they drive. But they’re the best drivers in the world. Mastrangelo weaves in and out of traffic without even getting near the brake. If the seat belt and coffin-sized back seat hadn’t pinned me in place, I would’ve hit the back windshield like a fly.

Photo: John Henderson

The dispatcher tells us to stand down. An officer had reached the old man. We’re on a small service road and Salimbene tells Mastrangelo to stop. He sees someone. He gets out of the car and asks a young Italian with short-cropped hair and a neat moustache to show his papers. He hands Salimbene his identity card and papers for his car without protest. Salimbene hands them back and we return to the car.

“Why did you stop him?” I ask.

“Sixth sense,” he says.

The next call comes quickly. It’s a noisy neighbor. We go to a rundown single-storey apartment complex with a crumbling driveway and some ratty plants in the corridor. We knock on the door and a middle-aged woman with a hulking son answer the door. They talk for about 20 minutes, telling them a neighbour has been pounding walls for about a month. They’re tired of it.

Tor Bella Monaca is considered to be the most dangerous area in Rome. Photo: Maurizio Sacco

Salimbene knocks on the neighbour’s door. Opening the big sliding cage-like door is an old man with big glasses. He explains his side of the story, frequently shaking his hands in prayer formation, the Italian hand gesture for “You’ve got to be kidding me!” Salimbene and Mastrangelo patiently hear his side.

“It’s been a long time this has been going on,” Salimbene says later. “The person doesn’t want to deal with this anymore.I told her, you are free to go to the police station and explain this. Maybe you need to talk to the person in charge of the building.

“He said he hasn’t done anything and is not making noises. I just tell him to make less noise and not to bother other people in the building.”

The next call sounds a little more serious. It’s a fight. Mastrangelo flies through the streets, seemingly on air. Space seems to mysteriously appear between cars that didn’t exist seconds earlier. I feel as if I’m in the middle of a magic act. We arrive at a corner and there are two old disheveled men, in their 50s or 60s. One seems to have a dent in the middle of his nose. His long-sleeve white shirt is covered in blood. Shards of a broken litre-sized beer bottle lay in the grass around him. He’s sitting on a folding chair talking smack to a short, chubby man standing off to the side.

The two are cursing at eachother, before the man in the chair makes a few threatening steps towards the other and Mastrangelo gets in a way, gently leading him back to the chair.

The two officers are joined by two others, plus two men in plain clothes. In Rome, fights are rare. So are drunks. Italians don’t drink very much. Drunk driving arrests must be among the lowest in Europe.

But the man in the white shirt is inebriated. Mastrangelo and Salimbene talk to the bloodied man until an ambulance comes. The man says the pair were fighting and the other one head-butted him in the face. After he’s placed in with some protest, they turn to the Romanian who explains his side with many shrugs of the shoulders. He says in excellent Italian that he’s been in Rome since 2006 and friends with the other for five years. No one finds out what the argument is about except, Salimbene says, “stupid things.”

No witnesses saw the head-butt. No arrest is made. The police collect all the contact information.

“The most important thing is what the hospital is going to say,” Salimbene says. “How many days will he need to recover.”

The last call comes about a domestic argument. Domestic fights are taken seriously in Rome, especially since May 29th, when a 27-year-old man stalked his ex-girlfriend to her car, set it on fire and then set her on fire when she tried to flee. He watched her burn alive. It was the 55th “femicide,” or domestic violence, incident in Italy this year. Last year it had 128.

We whizz through the streets onto a quiet, dark street behind a supermarket where a young couple are talking calmly. The police bring over a woman, a 23-year-old with long brown hair who keeps saying, “Niente. Niente. Mi dispiace. (Nothing. Nothing. I’m sorry.)” The man, tall and slender with a untucked long-sleeve shirt, keeps giving the shaking-hands-in-prayer motion.

As the police chat with the man, I find myself next to the woman who says, “Ciao.” We start chatting in Italian until my American accent hits her over the head.

“You’re American? You’re from Oregon?” she says in really good English. “I love America. I love Oregon. I went there last year.”

It turns out, she’s a Ukrainian who came here to finish high school and never left. I ask her some delicate questions about their alleged fight. Apparently, she lives with her boyfriend and she came to visit her parents in the nearby apartment house. He came over, very tired, when she didn’t want him to and they carried out their argument in the street. The driver of a car passing by saw them arguing and called the police.

That’s it.

Her boyfriend noticeably calms down as Mastrangelo and Salimbene quietly talk to him. They let them go but they tell the woman that if you ever get hit, she must call the police and can also use some social services.

“We made sure they didn’t have any record of violence,” Salimbene says. “He’s clean. We see the girl didn’t have any marks. They’re good kids.”

It’s midnight. Their shift is over. We go to the police station on Tuscolana where Salimbene spends 30 minutes filling out a report on the fight. Then comes the most dangerous part of the night.

They drive me home.

In the car before the wild ride home.

Salimbene takes over the wheel and flies 120 kilometres per hour down side streets. He’s dashing around cars, screeching around corners, flying through intersections. As I’m stretching the elasticity of the un-elastic seat belt, I see the police flashers reflecting in passing store windows that are nothing more than a blur.

“Why are the blinkers on?” I squeal.

“Because we’re going fast,” Salimbene says.

We squeeze through two lanes of cars — including one lane that’s coming our direction — going 120. One slip of the wheel, one person running across the street, and there’s blood, glass and destruction.

In a lame attempt at asking a leading but inoffensive question, I bleat, “You ever have an accidents?”

“No. We get a lot of practice.”

They stop in front of my apartment building, I believe, about 90 seconds after we left the station 6.5 miles away. I pick up the coins that had rolled down my trouser leg, thank them and walk up to my fourth-floor flat on very shaky legs.

It was the highlight of a fairly dull night. Not every police ride in Rome is dull but I was impressed by how Salimbene and Mastangelo kept things dull. Their calm demeanor never escalated any situation. They never raised their voices. They were more interested in helping the people than making an arrest.

Two police rides don’t make a city’s reputation safe in my eyes. But statistics do. So do two-and-a-half years of life experiences. As I’m writing this, someone in America is using the gun they bought to protect their home to shoot their cheating wife instead. Meanwhile, in Rome, I just make sure I wear my money belt.

The above article was shared with The Local Italy by John Henderson, a journalist living in Rome and the author of Dog-Eared Passport.

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TERRORISM

Terror alerts: Should I be worried about travelling to Italy?

Italy is on its highest-level terror alert and ministers have warned the public to be vigilant over the Easter holidays - so is there cause for concern if you're planning to travel in the country?

Terror alerts: Should I be worried about travelling to Italy?

Italian authorities agreed on Monday to increase anti-terrorism monitoring ahead of the Easter holidays, with more surveillance to be carried out at popular tourist spots and at “sensitive sites”.

Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani had stressed to the public on Sunday that Italy faced “no concrete risk” at the moment, and said the country’s security and law enforcement services were “always on the alert to prevent any attack.”

READ ALSO: Italy on maximum terror alert over Easter after Moscow attack

Nevertheless, he warned that “during the Easter holidays you will need to be very careful.”

Italy has been on its highest-level terror alert since October 2023 following the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war, meaning the official alert level could not be raised any further on Monday.

The plan for increased surveillance and the warnings to the public in Italy came following the terrorist attack at a concert hall in Moscow on Friday where armed men opened fire and set the building ablaze, killing at least 133 people.

Ministers said that terror plots on this scale, organised by groups, “would be intercepted sooner in Italy” and said the main terror threat Italy faced at the moment was mainly from “lone wolves”.

He was referring to the fact that recent deadly attacks in Europe have often been carried out by a single perpetrator, not affiliated to a terrorist organisation. The profile of attackers is often isolated young men who have become radicalised.

Unlike most other major European countries, Italy has not so far suffered any deadly attacks at the hands of jihadist militants.

Experts have suggested that Italy has been able to prevent attacks partly due to lessons learned from anti-mafia policing, and that it also has a lower number of citizens at risk of radicalisation than countries like the UK or France – and therefore fewer suspects to watch.

The country arrests dozens of suspects every year on terrorism charges following surveillance operations. Earlier in March, three men of Palestinian origin were arrested in the Abruzzo town of l’Aquila, alleged to be involved in an organised terror plot.

In 2023, at least 56 foreign nationals were deported from Italy after facing terror-related charges.

Italy is generally seen as being at a lower risk of being hit by a major terror attack than some neighbouring countries. So what exactly does the raised alert level mean for people in the country?

Heightened security

While much of Italy’s counter-terrorism work goes on behind the scenes, there will be increased police and military patrols over Easter in busy public places deemed “sensitive”, including shopping centres and places of worship.

The most visible manifestation of the heightened security alert in Italy is the armed soldiers on patrol outside government buildings, tourist attractions, airports, train stations, central squares and in other busy public areas.

Unlike in some other European countries, Italy’s airports do not regularly experience bomb hoaxes and other threats. While no additional security checks for passengers are being introduced, security is likely to remain tight at Italian airports this Easter, as at all European transport hubs.

If you’re visiting a major tourist attraction over Easter or attending any type of large public event, expect a high level of security at the door.

Travel advice

So far, no country has warned its nationals against visiting Italy – the US State Department still lists the alert level for Italy as Level 2: Exercise Increased Caution, which has seen no change since July 2023. 

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