The Fight to Stop Young Italians Dying in Police Custody

All photos of Italian police by Mattia Marinolli

Since the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa, Italy's police have been under permanent scrutinisation. And for good reason; during the event, over 250 activists were abused while being detained, and in a separate incident at the summit a 23-year-old protester was shot dead by a police officer.

Since then, there have been a series of indiscriminate beatings during demonstrations and some very suspicions deaths. The deceased have different stories, but are all bound by one factor: they died while in police custody.

The most publicised police-related deaths are those of Stefano Cucchi and Federico Aldrovandi. When Cucchi was brought in on weed possession charges he was perfectly healthy; a week later, he was dead. During that time he had lost almost 20kg and there was evidence that he had been beaten. Aldrovandi, an 18-year-old student, was beaten to death by four policemen in 2005. Authorities said he was responsible for his own death because he'd mixed alcohol and drugs, but the autopsy found that the dosage in his bloodstream was nowhere near lethal. A new Italian activist group, ACAD (Associazione Contro Gli Abusi in Divisa, which translates to Association Against Abuse in Uniform), was formed at the end of January to provide victims (and their families) of this kind of abuse with legal and financial support. I called up their spokesperson, Davide Brega, to learn a little more about the organisation.

VICE: Hi Davide. How was ACAD created?
Davide Brega: Various people contributed to the formation of ACAD. It started spontaneously, and then people started participating with a more proactive attitude. The Aldrovandi case was the first and most famous one we took on. We started with simply supporting the family through the various stages of the lawsuit. That's when we started thinking about creating an organisation that would help people who run up against these problems, and to support those already facing them.

The Aldrovandi family had to pay thousands of euros for legal technical appraisals. Not everybody has the economic resources to pay off the judicial expenses, so one of the goals of the association is to support the pursuit of truth and justice

What kind of background do the founders have?
One of the qualities of ACAD, and I hope it will remain like this in the future, is the diverse background of the first founders – from other associations’ representatives to writers to people with a political background. There isn’t any ideological or political bond among us; we’re rather different people willing to contribute to a specific cause. Do you think your group should exclude a political point of view, or do you believe it’s important to have one?
First of all, one of the fundamental points of the association’s statute is anti-fascism, because if we analyse the current situation, even from an economic point of view, it's clear that police forces have a well-defined role in this kind of system. Since the beginning of the financial crisis there's been a rise in totalitarianism, racism and repression of those who try to self-organise to survive. Anti-fascism was, and still is, the glue keeping our association together. Then, speaking on behalf of all the founders, I think that anti-racism and anti-sexism are necessary forms of respect we must believe in to carry out our activities. You've already been accused of trying to put the police in a bad light. Is that right?
Look, when we first approached Federico Aldrovandi’s mother she referred to the police officers accused of her son’s death as “rotten apples”. That view of them remains, but what's emerged in other cases is a devious and wide protection of people from different government bodies. The victims of abuse [perpetrated by government bodies] ask for justice without succeeding. We're not subversive, neither do we want to label these people. We have simply proved that, in Italy, it’s almost impossible to expose any truth in a case of abuse by police forces.

A police officer striking a pose in Turin

Yeah, that seems to be a pretty common problem worldwide. Why is that, in your opinion? Do you think there's something wrong about the way the state relates to its citizens?
The concept of imposing order with the use of force is certainly the wrong idea. Too often, police have inflicted "justice" with physical brutality. With the spread of smartphones, many cases came to light and we have proof of that on our website. Obviously, there are also many events that weren't videoed, not to mention the roughly 15,000 cases of “suicide” in jails over the past few years. [In prison], we have a micro-climate where human rights are constantly violated.

So how do you plan to provide support?
ACAD is defined as an operational association with many initiatives. One of those, for example, is the toll-free number that we’ve just launched. We have a network of activists and lawyers who support us, all of them working voluntarily. We work together to dig up previous cases labelled as “natural death”, trying to examine them again and find out the truth. We put a lot of focus on research and the monitoring of the field. How large is the organisation at the moment?
We have lawyers and activists all over Italy. The founders are mainly in central-north Italy, and the headquarters are in Bergamo, northern Italy. National coverage is fundamental in making the association successful. Finally, have you found that many people are aware of the issue of police brutality? Or are a lot of people still in the dark?
I'm convinced that we're reaching a higher level of awareness, which is also thanks to the increasing in-depth analysis [of the subject] on TV. The authorities' goal is always to criminalise [their] victim and put them in a bad light by digging through their past, but the idea that this kind of thing can happen to anyone has started to spread.

That said, manipulation of the media is very common and, most of the time, easy to achieve. Uva was depicted as an alcoholic homeless person, Aldrovandi and Cucchi as drug addicts – and so on. It’s trivial but efficient: the news is on the first page and the denial on the last one. However, it’s such a systematic approach that everyone, with a bit of understanding, realises what’s really happening.