Beppe Sala seemed off to a good start commenting on the beating of a woman by four local police officers. He immediately defined it as a “serious event” and immediately proceeded to assign the subjects in question to the internal services. A few hours later, however, his attitude of harsh condemnation seems to have already changed. However, the mayor of Milan cannot miss the opportunity to show everyone that the institutions must behave differently than they have always done in the face of abuses by law enforcement.
If it is true, in fact, that the Municipality of Milan did not want to downplay the seriousness of what its police officers committed, it is also true that la Giunta confirmed and contributed to spreading a false reconstruction of the events and aimed at discrediting the victim of the beating. In fact, it was the security councilor Marco Granelli who published a post on Facebook in which he affirmed that the woman had been arrested because she “showed harassing attitudes towards those present”, that is, the children of a school. Circumstance that was first denied by parents and teachers of that school and then also by the prosecution.
In addition, Granelli’s post was published after a meeting at the Palacio Marino with local police chiefs (police chief Marco Ciacci did not respond to journalists’ questions and sent everyone back to the council) and the representatives of the Giunta, while we all waited to hear from them what had happened. Therefore it is the official version of the Municipalityshared by the top management of Palazzo Marino.
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And then the mayor himself tried to divert attention. “The real issue is that in the cities of the world there is so much unrest going around, so many unbalanced people, so many delicate situations. This is a subject that is rarely talked about: there is so much talk about immigration, little is said about how many people there are problems in the city. So sometimes you see the results,” he said.
Although it may be true that there is too much talk about immigration and too little about assistance to the weakest, which also depends precisely on the municipality, it is certainly not “the real issue” to address regarding what happened in front of Bocconi University. That of helping people in difficulty, even for psychic reasons, is another topic, certainly important, but It has nothing to do with the violence implemented by the police which I answer to him and his board.
With this statement, the mayor not only intended to include other issues in the controversy, although important, so as not to have to take forceful positions. To say that “then sometimes you see the results” means, in fact, They affirm that the beating that his agents gave him is also a consequence of the woman’s behavior and his predicament (still to be verified), which no one helped solve. But even Sala washes his hands of this lack of help: “It is clear that it is something that we cannot do alone. It is clear that it is something that the State really needs to have the will to work on. And, as always, unload the responsibility on the Government, whatever it is.
The problem is that Sala must be the expression of a center-left administration, which would have a duty to show that it wants to behave differently than everyone else has done when there have been violent crimes by the police. And instead, seems to be acting like the worst right, who tends to minimize and point fingers at the victim, even going so far as to invent crimes that he did not commit. For the sole purpose of alleging that the agents were forced to behave in that way.
Not by chance among the ranks of the majority of Palazzo Marino there are already those who criticize the work of the mayor and his councilor. Councilor Nahum is even “convinced that these agents should be suspended as a precaution and not relocated to other offices”, as has been done instead.
