Anger stirred in Italy this past week after forty-two-year-old Abderrahim Fakir was killed while under police restraint during a routine check in Bologna. On Sunday, Fakir’s neighbors had called emergency number 118 after hearing screams, and police arrived first on the scene. Video footage shows two officers grabbing the man and holding him face down on the street for several minutes, applying pressure on his back after pepper-spraying him while he was already face to the ground, his ankles bound. When paramedics arrived, they stood watching as Fakir cried “help, stop.” He then stopped talking and moving, before being pronounced dead at the scene. A later preliminary exam showed lung compression was a possible cause of death.

Fakir was a Moroccan national, and the country’s embassy said it was “following the case closely and with deep concern.” The Bologna city attorney has already opened a case against two officers and four paramedics, ordering an autopsy. But this case is also significant because for the first time a so-called criminal shield was invoked. This legal device, introduced in the right-wing government’s security decree this April, can prevent attorneys from writing someone on the suspect list if there is reason to believe they acted in self-defense or — crucially for violence by police — in the line of duty. This restarted debates about the propriety of this measure that many Italians already feared would give police too much power, and even impunity.

“They murdered him in cold blood. We are asking for justice and the truth about my brother’s death,” said the victim’s sister Khadija Fakir as she and hundreds of other people gathered spontaneously in Bologna on Sunday night to protest the killing. This event sparked sadness but also anger among social movements, who called for a reform of Italy’s institutions and police system. The next day, Bologna’s mayor Matteo Lepore pleaded for a “united city,” as he called for and then attended a further demonstration on Monday, at which thousands of people gathered in the city’s central Piazza del Nettuno. “Those who wear a uniform bear a huge responsibility: to protect people, especially the most vulnerable,” Yossra, Fakir’s niece, insisted from the stage.