The history of bodycams in Italy. Beyond the Fakir case

The bodycam footage from one of the two officers involved in the death of Abderrahim Fakir has, within a matter of hours, become the linchpin of an entire legal and political case. The defence interprets them as evidence that ‘there was no scuffle’, whilst the family takes the opposite view. However, there is one detail that overturns the most convenient interpretation of the incident: that device was not part of the standard issue. It was a private device, fitted by the officer for his own protection, because patrol cars – unlike mobile units – are not equipped with official bodycams. Now, the point here is not to determine who is right, nor to give credence to the latest speculations. The Bologna Public Prosecutor’s Office, which has opened an investigation into manslaughter, has ordered a post-mortem to shed light on both the officers’ actions and those of the medical staff: it is scheduled for 11 am this morning, and a deadline of 90 days has been set for the submission of the report. From there, we will likely have some further information, based on solid evidence. What we will do instead is ask ourselves where the bodycam technology comes from, and why, in a case like this, it proves to be both so decisive and so fragile. 

In Italy, the introduction of bodycams was driven by administrative requirements. In 2014, the Department of Public Security within the Ministry of the Interior asked the Data Protection Authority for permission to trial a wearable video recording system, as this constituted, to all intents and purposes, the processing of personal data. The Data Protection Authority authorised the trial by a decision dated 31 July 2014, which set out conditions and limits: the micro-cameras were assigned to specifically designated personnel from mobile units only, in four pilot cities – Turin, Milan, Rome and Naples – with a single purpose: to record critical situations in the maintenance of public order. This is therefore not a general roll-out, but a limited trial: a small number of devices in a few cities, for a single specialised unit, to be worn during a single type of operation.

The actual legal framework comes later, and in two stages. In August 2024, the issue is included in the security decree, but in a form that civil rights organisations such as Antigone and Amnesty International immediately deem weak: officers "may" use bodycams, not "must". For Antigone, the measure risks remaining “solely for the protection of the police”. For Amnesty, as currently worded, “it will not help to improve police accountability”. The criticism centres on two omissions in the text: it does not specify when an officer is required to switch on the device, nor how a member of the public can subsequently access footage concerning them. The final text is Decree-Law 48 of 2025, Article 21 of which stipulates that personnel deployed in public order, territorial surveillance, the monitoring of sensitive sites and rail services “may be equipped” with wearable video surveillance devices. There is therefore no obligation.

This is the crux of the matter that the Fakir case brings back to the table. Italian law leaves it to the officer’s discretion whether to switch the device on or off, without providing precise operational guidelines on when to do so. But in Bologna, the problem lies elsewhere: not only was the officer on patrol that day under no obligation to wear a bodycam, but he wasn’t even issued with one to switch on. The video exists only because that officer chose, at his own expense, to obtain one to protect himself. Outside the mobile units, coverage relies almost entirely on individual initiative.

This gives rise to a second problem: in the case of the death of the 42-year-old Moroccan man, as the device was private property, the images remain the property of the officer, and his defence team was able to view them and keep a copy. The civil party – the lawyers representing the Fakir family – do not have the same access: they had to request that the video be included in full in the investigation files, via the public prosecutor’s office. 

In the United States, the first bodycams appeared as early as the mid-2000s, but it was the trial conducted in Rialto, California, between 2012 and 2013, that changed things: officers without bodycams were found to be more than twice as likely to use force as their colleagues who wore them. The 2014 Ferguson shooting turned that evidence into a political priority: in 2015, the Obama administration allocated seventy-five million dollars to fund the purchase of such devices by local police departments. It should be noted, however, that there is no uniform federal requirement: the matter remains the responsibility of states and local authorities, with very uneven results across the country. However, a 2016 study by the University of Cambridge recorded a 93 per cent reduction in complaints against officers in departments that have adopted the technology.

In Europe, the situation is more straightforward. The United Kingdom, Germany, France, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark and Finland have adopted bodycams earlier than Italy and, in several cases, with stricter activation protocols. It is this same delay that explains why Italy remains, even today, one of the few European countries without mandatory identification codes for officers engaged in public order duties: two measures – bodycams and identification codes – which police unions have always treated as inseparable, rejecting both in their binding form.