The right to protest, the duty to protect, and that strange leniency shown towards those who attack the state, but never towards those who defend it

Imagine you are a police officer. You have a uniform, a helmet, a shield, a truncheon, a modest salary and a family waiting for you at home. You are out on the streets to safeguard the right to protest, not to prevent it. In front of you are people protesting peacefully, people who are angry for legitimate reasons, and people who are just waiting for the right moment to turn a march into a riot. Before they start throwing things, you cannot tell one group from the other. And by the time they do, it is often too late. Now imagine the moment when the demonstration turns violent: you have just a few seconds to make a decision that others will be judging for weeks to come. You must protect yourself, your colleagues, the peaceful demonstrators and passers-by. And you know that, if anything goes wrong, your conduct will be scrutinised with a rigour that is unlikely to be applied to those who attacked you.

Welcome to the paradox of Italian public order. If a protester throws a stone at a police officer, there will be someone ready to explain the context, the social anger, and the underlying reasons for the act. If a police officer reacts disproportionately, they will be held to account. But the context will become irrelevant. The violent protester has a story that needs to be understood; the police officer who makes a mistake has a fault that must be punished. There is a serious reason for demanding a higher standard of discipline from those who wear a uniform: the state holds the legitimate monopoly on the use of force, and those who represent it must abide by stricter rules. This is an achievement of liberal civilisation, not an abuse of power. Yet from this sacrosanct truth we have arrived at an absurdity: expecting those who legitimately exercise public authority to almost be ashamed of it, even when it is necessary.

Consider the police officer’s perspective. If I stand by and let the rioters destroy a city, they’ll accuse me of failing to do my duty. If I intervene and someone gets hurt, they’ll accuse me of turning a protest into repression. If we back down, the state appears weak. If we advance, it’s authoritarian. And if someone smashes my head in, let’s at least hope the prognosis is serious enough to warrant a few seconds of televised outrage.

There is something profoundly unjust about all this. Not because violence by a police officer should be justified, but because violence against a police officer should never be relativised. Understanding the reasons behind a protest is a political duty, but when a protest turns into aggression, the causes cannot automatically become moral mitigating factors. The police officer is not responsible for inequalities, low wages or wars: he is a worker sent there to ensure that everyone can exercise their freedoms.

Our police officer is not asking for impunity. He is asking that he be expected to respect the law, without forgetting that that law must also protect him. Because in the end, when a demonstration is over, the politicians return to their press releases, the demonstrators to their homes. The police officer goes home too, if all goes well. The following day he must don his uniform once again and defend the right to protest, including the right of those who, the day before, were shouting at him that he was a fascist. It is the paradox of democracy: asking those who defend freedom to protect even those who despise them. It would be commendable if, every now and then, democracy remembered to protect those who protect it.