ABSTRACT
In this chapter we describe and discuss the politics of policing in the two biggest Italian cities, Rome and Milan. The empirical focus of this intra-national comparison is on the formulation of policy agendas for policing, seeking to differentiate sub-national from national variation in policing, and context-dependent characteristics from any macro-tendencies (Edwards & Prins, 2014: 405–411). The two cities’ agendas are analysed for seven years (2007–14), a period characterised in Italy by remarkable financial and economic pressures on public bodies (see Selmini in this volume), by increasing centralisation (Calaresu, 2013, 2016, 2017), and by an extension of punitive measures and crime controls at the urban level (Selmini in this volume). Our analysis shows that the two cities dealt with these changes differently, with Milan showing a resistance to the national tendencies described above, and Rome being characterised by an ambiguous and fragmented policy agenda, apparently more influenced – even if with some conflicts – by the national government programmes. We argue that this divergence is mostly the result of the powers available to the mayors, of their political ideology, of some features of their biography and of their political careers, and of the divergent economic and social trajectories that characterised Milan and Rome in the last decade.
