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Where has the regulation of private services of the municipal police of Messina gone? This is a question posed by Giuseppe Gemellaro, secretary of Silpol, the Italian local police workers’ union, in a letter addressed to the mayor, the president of the municipal council, the secretary – general director and the commander of the municipal police.
«We had already intervened with a note way back on February 27, 2024 – recalls Gemellaro – to draw the attention of the Administration to the need to adopt the Regulation on Private Services of the Municipal Police and on various occasions we had the opportunity to bring the discussion to the union negotiating table without ever arriving at a definition of the problem. The reference legislation, which is already quite old, recalls the provisions of the art. 22 of Legislative Decree 24 April 2017 n. 50 and used largely by many other Italian cities, is to burden the organization and security costs, in this case those relating to services carried out by the Municipal Police, on the organizers of various types of events and viable events with profit-making purposes”.
«Also this season, and it is a good thing, the use of the F. Scoglio stadium and other sites for the staging of concerts – continues the Silpol secretary – has attracted large masses with a significant economic movement, even of several million euros for each single event in favor of the companies involved. In similar contexts it is very clear that the use of the Municipal Police, to guarantee not only traffic but also safety, according to the agreements established in the Prefecture and the consequent ritual procedures, is not only indispensable but also burdensome. These services in fact involve, given the extension of the shows until late at night, the continuation of the service hours with overtime for the staff involved”.
«It is therefore strange how the calls for the use of such an instrument, the failure to implement which has resulted in substantial sanctions from the various Courts of Auditors against those non-compliant bodies, have fallen on deaf ears. It is also strange that the aforementioned matter has not received the necessary attention to reach definitive approval and application to date. It will certainly not be the few tens of thousands of euros allocated for this purpose which could constitute a deterrent for the organizers precisely because they are negligible when compared to the volume of business that drives these events”.
Another similar aspect, « susceptible to attention due to its current nature and which we take the liberty of submitting to the evaluation of the administration, is that which concerns – according to Gemellaro – the costs deriving from the Municipal Police services connected with the “counter-exodus” operations which, like a ritual, are included in the calendar of sacrifices that the city must experience several times in a year. In this period, where the weather conditions are certainly not favourable, we must give credit and credit to the dedicated staff who, with extreme sacrifice and physical exhaustion, ensure that the city is freed from greater inconveniences. We ask ourselves whether it would not be appropriate to place the costs of such an intensive, expensive and dedicated service on the shipping companies that govern transit in the strait, due to the fact that several streets of the city are entirely dedicated to this function? And what about the continuous service dedicated to passengers disembarking from cruise ships? This is not an indiscriminate action aimed at discouraging the initiative of private individuals or limiting the holding, due to greater costs, of those events that are included in the manifestations of citizen interest”.
Gemellaro reiterates «once again, the need to implement a reference legislation, regulation, widely applied in the rest of the cities of Italy and to use in this sense financing instruments which would ultimately prove residual in the context of the resources that characterize the so-called “Major Events”».