Italian city mayors on Monday asked Interior Minister Roberto Maroni for special powers to deal with security issues becoming a major concern for citizens.
Around 20 mayors from large and medium-sized cities met with Maroni to bid for tools, resources and legal means to deal with problems such as prostitution, unauthorised use of public grounds and buildings, child beggars and urban degradation.
The mayors' plea comes in the wake of a growing sense of insecurity among Italians and a successful election campaign by the centre right waged largely on immigration and security issues.
''The minister knows what the security problems are and we are absolutely optimistic that he will be able to accommodate our requests,'' said Parma Mayor Pietro Vignali, leading the delegation of first citizens. Among the mayors' specific demands were a revision to laws on arming city police and allowing local police access to government databases.
Verona Mayor Flavio Tosi said he pushed for a law allowing police to detain people for 24 hours in prison cells if pulled in for vandalism, drunkenness and other civil decorum misdemeanours.
''Local administrations could make people see that if they make a mistake they pay the price,'' he said.
Maroni told the mayors he was prepared to consider amendments to the government security decree currently being discussed in parliament and that he would give them an answer later in the week.
But he stressed that any new measures needed to have a long-term scope.
''We want and have to come up with a solution that is not an emergency or one-off response, but a system addressing the problems of security in the cities,'' Maroni said.
He added that for this reason he planned to ask for the removal of a Senate justice committee amendment to the decree that would make soliciting a crime and result in the immediate repatriation of foreign street prostitutes caught in the act.
''Defining soliciting as a crime and punishing it is a proposal that has its pros and cons. It's necessary to think about a definitive solution that resolves or attenuates the situation,'' he said.
The government's emergency security decree - which included increasing sentences by one third in the event they are committed by illegal immigrants and expelling foreigners who receive sentences of two years or more - came into effect in May but must be approved by parliament within 60 days.
The decree is unlikely to meet with serious problems since the government has a comfortable majority in both the House and the Senate.
