Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- A Note on Usage
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Police Power in the Italian Communes
- 2 Police Discretion and Personal Autonomy
- 3 The Logic of Third-Party Policing
- 4 External Threats: Policing Out-Groups and Criminality
- 5 Internal Threats: Policing Violence and Enmity
- 6 The Social Impact of Third-Party Policing
- Conclusion
- About the author
- Index
2 - Police Discretion and Personal Autonomy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- A Note on Usage
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Police Power in the Italian Communes
- 2 Police Discretion and Personal Autonomy
- 3 The Logic of Third-Party Policing
- 4 External Threats: Policing Out-Groups and Criminality
- 5 Internal Threats: Policing Violence and Enmity
- 6 The Social Impact of Third-Party Policing
- Conclusion
- About the author
- Index
Summary
Abstract
Chapter 2 examines patrol officers’ (berrovarii) use of discretion in deciding how to apply the commune's statutes to the realities they encountered in the street. It asks to what extent social identity and political status influenced these officers’ judgments and explores a number of legal ambiguities they had to navigate in their encounters with locals. The evidence suggests that the familia enforced the statutes aggressively and with a remarkable degree of impersonality, treating lawbreakers as equally as the statutes would allow. As such, the familia's patrols made the threat of punishment credible for all citizens, including elites, and made them more subject to government authority. Third-party policing thus infringed significantly on the personal autonomy of citizens and diminished their ability to negotiate justice on their own terms.
Keywords: legal presumption, legal fictions, travelers, legal minors, legal privilege, public space
In January 1287, two berrovarii testified in court against Ugolino Zovenzoni, whom they had charged with carrying a prohibited knife. The Zovenzoni banking family, whose members frequently held public office, was among the city's most prominent, but this did not seem to faze the podestà's familiares. The judge began by asking the berrovarii a simple factual question: had they discovered a knife on the defendant while patrolling a few days earlier? The officers proceeded to tell their side of the story with the defendant present before them. When they encountered Ugolino on patrol, they called after him to stop and submit to a pat-down. Ugolino, however, “pretended not to hear” and entered the shop of a certain barber instead, “not permitting himself to be searched.” Not to be deterred, the berrovarii followed Ugolino inside and checked him for weapons there. Although they did not find any on his person, they did find a knife in a pail inside the shop.
They therefore arrested Ugolino on the basis of presumption and led him before the podestà's knight. Questioning Ugolino in turn, the judge asked him if the knife found by the berrovarii was in fact his. Ugolino admitted the knife belonged to him, but claimed he had placed it in the barber’s shop for safekeeping before the familia searched him.
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- Police Power in the Italian Communes, 1228–1326 , pp. 93 - 132Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019