the central question — sources at the end of this entry

Why were there only two officers, and why were private citizens directly involved?

THE NUMBER

A single patrol car with two officers arrived in via Italo Svevo. The guidelines issued by the Department of Public Security on 11 May 2026 on handling uncooperative persons state that restraining someone who offers strong resistance requires complex techniques and four officers, with the support of a second patrol car or of the Carabinieri. They also state that, when an agitated person is reported, the patrol should inform the operations room and request that further units be sent.

Two officers therefore faced, with the help of private citizens, a situation that the protocol says should be handled by four trained officers.

This does not, on its own, prove criminal liability. But it shifts the question: not “the two officers used the wrong hold”, but “why were those two officers alone, and who was supposed to send the others”.

TO BE VERIFIED: it is not publicly known whether back-up was requested. That is the question to ask.

WHAT THE GUIDELINES SAY ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE PRESENT

In the section on de-escalation, the document explicitly lists, among the officer's actions, MOVING AWAY any other people who might heighten the subject's agitation. Under the protocol, civilians are to be kept at a distance. At the Pilastro, four of them took part in physically restraining him instead.

WHAT A PRIVATE CITIZEN MAY DO — THE LEGAL FRAMEWORK

A warning: this is a matter for criminal lawyers, and what follows sets out only the applicable provisions, not legal advice.

Article 383 of the Code of Criminal Procedure — POWER OF ARREST BY PRIVATE CITIZENS. A citizen may make an arrest in flagrante only for the offences listed in Article 380, that is the serious offences for which arrest is mandatory, and only where they are prosecutable ex officio. The citizen must then hand the arrested person over to the judicial police without delay: the Court of Cassation has made clear that they may not hold the person beyond the time strictly needed for the handover. Fakir's case does not fall within this scenario: no offence carrying mandatory arrest was in progress.

Article 52 of the Criminal Code — SELF-DEFENCE. The guidelines themselves make clear that, unlike the justification under Article 51 which is reserved to public officials, self-defence may be invoked by anyone, subject to the requirement of proportionality between the attack and the defence. It could plausibly cover the driver of the car at the moment he was shoved. It is far harder to see how it could cover someone who goes on holding down the ankles of a man already tied, once the attack has ceased.

Article 51 of the Criminal Code — EXERCISE OF A RIGHT OR PERFORMANCE OF A DUTY. The guidelines present it as reserved to police officers. In legal scholarship the second limb of the provision — the carrying out of a lawful order of a public authority — is also debated in relation to private citizens. This is the most delicate point in law, because according to some witness accounts it was the officers themselves who asked a member of the public for help.

Article 54 of the Criminal Code — NECESSITY. A third justification that could in the abstract be invoked.

Article 588 of the Criminal Code — AFFRAY. In fairness it must be said: what happened is NOT an affray in the technical sense, which requires at least three people fighting one another. The sources speak of a scuffle.

THE PROCEDURAL FACT: none of the four civilians is entered in the register under Article 45-bis. It contains only the two officers and the four Red Cross volunteers.

THE OPEN QUESTIONS

1. Was back-up requested? By whom, when, and with what answer from the operations room?
2. If an officer asks a passer-by to help restrain a person, is that passer-by covered by a justification?
3. And the officer who asks, having a protocol that requires him to move bystanders away, how does he answer for that choice?

SOURCES FOR THIS ENTRY (full links are on page 4)
— Guidelines of the Department of Public Security, 11 May 2026, reported by Sky TG24, Il Post, Today and BolognaToday on 20-21 July 2026.
— il Resto del Carlino, 22 July 2026, the officers' service report.
— il Resto del Carlino, 25 July 2026, the four civilians on the bodycam footage.
— The texts of the Criminal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure: Articles 51, 52, 54, 588 CC and 380, 383 CCP.