Per un esercizio «bene ripartito e cautelato». La tutela dell’individuo dal "poter discrezionale" della polizia fra storia e storiografia

The essay questions the way italian political systems in history have protected the individual from the discretional power of their police, either in law or pratice. The need to set a limit is not exclusive of modern constitutional states, which, on their part, have granted to the police a considerable space of discretionary action and actual impunity for a long time. Italian political culture owes to Romagnosi an important contribution to clarifying the issue of police accountability, due to his personal legal odyssey in Restauration Lombardy-Venetia. Italian historiography became sensitive to the topic in the Sixties and Seventies and focused on the so-called liberal-age, less interested in examining the earlier steps of the history of policing, which are now better known thanks to recent research on organization and practice.