Public Safety and Berlusconi.

In Italy, last elections were based on the general ground that public safety had been undermined by Prodi, our ex prime minister. As a consequence,Berlusconi's party, who has the largest control on public media ever allowed in any modern democracy, with the coward immobility and, i would dare to say, consensus, of the Left party, had triggered all his media in order to increase the perception of fear and unsafety in all our major cities. Of course, the Left party was to be held responsible because of its "connatural" and indiscriminate tolerance and acceptance of everybody, instead of a safer policy which would have allowed a more regulated flow of immigrants. Although, to some very little extent, I can justify the claims of the Right and I am not going to discuss why Prodi's cabinet dealt in this way with the problem, as an example of such change was brought Rome, which, by chance, had Veltroni as a Mayor (Veltroni was Berlusconi's opponent in the last elections). As a matter of fact, Rome is actually quite safe, don't forget it is Italy Capital and it is the largest city and thus, like any big city has problems. Traveling a lot, I can say that it is not comparable to NY, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, or in Europe, Madrid, Barcelona, London which are much more dangerous cities. I am very far from saying it is the safest, but everything has to be put in the right context. It is not reasonable to ask for Rome to be as safe as Gaiano. Propaganda against Rome('s mayor) was done in spite of the fact that Milan is, actually, the most dangerous city in Italy, according to the numbers, but little to nothing was said during the campaign because its Mayor is from PDL (Berlusconi's party). I should add that the Left Party was literally unable to provide a logical counter-campaign. Let's go back to the reason of this post. What is happening now ? As anybody in Italy knows, even those who are with Berlusconi, he has been suited for a number of crimes, for some of which, because of laws his previous governament has passed, he has not been condemned. In the last days, he is trying to avoid another one in different manners. First, through what is known as Lodo Schifani. Briefly, this would imply that the highest authorities in Italy cannot be charged during their public service. Now, as said in one of my previous posts, this is unprecedented in Italy. It puts on different levels authorities and normal people and moreover, in the way it is proposed, it seriously undermines the possibility of controlling their legal actions. This is at the basis of our democratic system. Second, with the excuse of speed up the Justice process, in the "public safety bill", he has added an amendment through which he is blocking "minor" trials. This implicitly blocks his, but also charges like extortion, rape,robbery, kidnapping just to name a few and most of those for which this bill has been made. Contrary to what he had claimed during the electoral campaign, from the economic side, his cabinet has cut the funds for the State and Defense Deparments, which will put a stop at increasing the salaries of the police forces (1200 euro per month), and seriously, more than even the Left had done, undermine the normal police operations (car, gas, overtime hours), plus a 6000 agents cut, for a total of 1.5 billion euro. Is this what Berlusconi means when he talks about Safety ? Or is he just talking about his own ?