"Any suggestion that there is a Government plan to repress political dissent and that this plan is carried out by the police forces during public order services must be immediately rejected."
Thus the Minister of the Interior, Matteo Piantedosi, responding to question time in the Chamber.
"There is not, and there can never be - added Piantedosi - any ministerial directive in this sense nor any indications aimed at changing the operating rules for managing public order, which have always been characterized by caution, balance and professionalism, to regardless of the political color of the Government in office".
The intervention of the State Police to identify the participants in the demonstration to commemorate Aleksei Navalny in Milan "was based exclusively on the need to ensure that all security conditions were in place for the demonstration to take place, to guarantee the participants themselves, to faced with very summary and imprecise information regarding the identification of the promoter and the methods of implementation contained in the notice received. Only for these reasons, and since the promoter did not reveal himself, the operators proceeded to identify the people present at the initiative".
Thus the Minister of the Interior, Matteo Piantedosi, responding to question time in the Chamber.
"There is - underlined Piantedosi - no ministerial directive to which this legitimate operational choice refers, since identification is a prerogative of the police force always entrusted to the choice of personnel in service and to the sensitive evaluation of the operational context and , even in the case in question, evidently had no purpose of preventing or hindering the free exercise of the initiative, but, rather, of guaranteeing its orderly development. Given this purpose, in such situations, a choice that may appear too zealous is in any case to be preferred to an attitude which, otherwise, could risk some underestimation".
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