The growing use of intimidation by the police against organisations and individuals who disturb the interests of the employers or the administration of the bourgeois state has been evident for years, even before the installation of the Meloni government. We have witnessed student demonstrations repressed with batons, fascistic attacks against workers deliberately ignored by the police, and politically motivated complaints used to intimidate demonstrators.
Yesterday in Cosenza this trend reached yet another point of no return, with the completely arbitrary assault carried out by three police officers against investigative journalist Gabriele Carchidi. Stopped while taking a walk, he was beaten, restrained and handcuffed for refusing to show his identity documents. Gabriele Carchidi is a well-known journalist in Calabria, and particularly in the Cosenza area. He is the author of numerous articles exposing the complicity of public administrations and state bodies with exploitative interests, private healthcare businesses and organised crime. An arrest of this kind, just like the demand to produce identification documents, cannot be justified on any grounds related to public order. This is all the more true given that the victim is already widely known in the area as the editor of his news outlet.
The truth is that we are dealing with a clear act of intimidation, encouraged by the climate of tolerance towards abuses committed by uniformed officers that has been fostered by the centre-right government. We recall the rhetoric promoted by the Meloni government claiming that law enforcement officers do not currently have a “free hand” to intervene in order to suppress forms of social dissent or ordinary crime.
In expressing our solidarity with Gabriele Carchidi, we once again denounce the repressive drift of the police forces, which increasingly demonstrate that they serve as an apparatus for the defence and protection of the business class and the political forces tied to it.
