Policemen arrested in Verona, the homeless man humiliated: “They dragged me in the urine”

They targeted the weakest, almost always foreigners and the homeless. The five policemen arrested on Tuesday (an inspector and four officers) with the allegations of torture, injuries, false ideology, omissions of official duties, embezzlement and abuse of office, they carefully chose their victims: the outcasts of society. “Circumstance which, on the one hand, allowed the suspects to more easily overcome any resistance from their victims”, wrote the investigating judge, “on the other, it strengthened the conviction of the same suspects to remain immune from any consequence” strong in the fact that none of the victims would have ever filed a complaint. They covered each other, laughed at the beatings, bragged about the beatings when they stopped someone”.

The witness

One of the victims of the cops is Nicolae Daju, 56 years old, Romanian homeless, in Verona for 3 years to look for work. He sleeps on the park benches in front of the monumental cemetery, and has only a backpack in which he keeps a blanket, a pillow, two spare trousers, three shirts and a pair of winter shoes.

When the agents reached him to ask for his documents «I was at the Primo Kilometro bar, in the Fiera area. I was with a friend, we were drinking a beer and a coffee», he told a Republic. “I told him we weren’t doing anything wrong but, in the end, I gave him my ID. It wasn’t enough, they told me to get in the car». Before letting him on board, however, even if he hadn’t objected in any way, «they sprayed pepper spray on my face».

At the police station, one of the policemen grabbed his hair to drag him into a cell with a transparent wall. Then the humiliation. “I needed to go to the bathroom, urgently. I tried to get the attention of a policeman by gesturing through the transparent wall.’ The agents, however, replied «that it was not possible to go to the bathroom and that I would have to do it on the ground». So Nicolae Daju listened to them: «I stood in a corner and peed. Unfortunately they punished me for this. As soon as I finished urinating a policeman stormed inside. He sprayed my face with pepper spray one more time and then he did me dragged to the ground over the pool of urine».

It wasn’t over yet: “When I got up, at a certain point, the first policeman punched me in the liver.” Only after 21 was the homeless man accompanied to the exit and released.

ID number and bodycam

Second Ilaria CucchiSenator Avs, the case of the five arrested policemen is «the spy of a phenomenon that should not be underestimated, given also the dozens of agents under investigation and the transfer in recent weeks of about twenty agents for criminal and disciplinary findings. Therefore, as is usually said in these cases, it is not a question of “rotten apples”, but of a real system of coverage to cover liability and avert suspicion”.

The senator therefore believes «absolutely It is necessary to introduce the identification code for police force personnel and bodycams into our legislation to be affixed to the helmets or uniforms of the agents with the aim of filming, from the beginning to the end of the service, any violations of rights that may occur”. Identification number and bodycam would not only be a means to discover possible responsibilities, “but above all a protection for the forces of order themselves”.