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.

When some activists confronted the police forces deployed in the square, as people were trying to reach the police prefecture in Bologna’s Piazza Roosevelt, tensions rose. Within minutes, the confrontation spiraled from shoving to the police using tear gas and water cannons. It’s an all-too-common feature of the Italian state’s way of imposing public order. The protest ended in violent clashes, with many activists hurt and cars set on fire.

If Fakir’s death again brought out a deep polarization in Italian politics, it was the conflict at this protest march that really made the masks fall. The ruling right-wing coalition had soon expressed solidarity with the police agents involved in the fatal incident. The Senate president Ignazio La Russa — a longtime member of the neofascist Movimento Sociale Italiano — said he “always stands with police” and expressed his distance from those “who can always be assumed to be against them,” adding that he has full “trust in the judicial system” to find out what happened. The opposition reaction was, however, timid. The Partito Democratico’s leader Elly Schlein said “the state has failed and has the responsibility to shed light on this tragedy.” Nicola Fratoianni, another prominent center-left opposition leader, asked for questions in Parliament for the justice and interior ministers.

Political leaders of all colors distanced themselves from activists. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni spoke of “unacceptable violence against the police,” in a claim echoed by both the ruling and opposition coalitions. Many representatives — both members of far-right parties like Matteo Salvini’s Lega and centrists like Azione’s leader Carlo Calenda — went further, calling for Bologna’s center-left Mayor Lepore to resign over having attended the demonstration and called for the protest to happen. On Wednesday, the police union Sindacato Autonomo di Polizia (SAP) instructed a lawyer to file charges against Mayor Lepore to make him “answer for the damage from a demonstration he organized.” Even though this is a right-wing union, the tensions between these different organs of the Italian state should not be underestimated.

These reactions vastly oversimplified what happened. They prevented any assessment of whether the police had indulged in a disproportionate use of force from the start and whether it had fueled tensions, which were already high given the anger over Fakir’s death. In the last year, there have been repeated clashes between left-wing activists and police, and condemnation by opposition leaders has widened the distance between social movements and the political class.