For the fifth consecutive year, students at the 'Rummo' Scientific High School in Benevento spent a school day not in ordinary lessons but alongside officers from multiple units of the Italian State Police - attending workshops, watching canine demonstrations, and examining a recreated crime scene set up within their own school. The initiative, titled A Scuola di polizia - Education for Legality and Familiarization with the Police, aims to close the distance between young people and the institutions responsible for their safety. Third, fourth, and fifth-year students all took part, and by most accounts the level of engagement across all three year groups was notably high.
Building Trust Between Institutions and the Next Generation
The event opened with remarks from Giovanni Leuci, Chief of Police of Benevento, who framed the initiative not as a recruitment exercise but as a civic one - an investment in the relationship between state institutions and the school community. School principal Annamaria Morante, who has consistently championed legality and prevention-focused education at the institute, was also present. Her sustained commitment to this kind of programming reflects a broader conviction that civic awareness is not a subject that can be confined to a single textbook chapter.
That conviction has particular resonance at a moment when trust in public institutions among younger demographics is far from guaranteed. Events like this one operate on a straightforward premise: familiarity reduces suspicion, and direct contact with officers doing real work is more persuasive than any classroom abstraction about civic duty. The format - practical, varied, and participatory - is designed precisely to hold the attention of an audience that has grown up with constant, competing stimuli.
Digital Dangers Take Centre Stage Alongside Traditional Safety Topics
Officers from several specialized departments rotated through sessions with students, covering ground that ranged from drug use among adolescents to road safety. But the participation of the Postal Police - Italy's unit responsible for cybercrime and online safety - drew particular interest. Their sessions addressed cyberbullying, online scams, the responsible use of social networks, and the protection of digital privacy.
These are not abstract concerns for this age group. Adolescents spend substantial portions of their daily lives online, often without a clear sense of where the risks lie or what legal protections exist. The Postal Police's role in explaining those risks in plain, practical terms carries a weight that a standard classroom lesson rarely achieves. When the person explaining the dangers of sharing personal data online is the same officer who investigates the consequences of doing so, the message lands differently.
The inclusion of digital privacy and online safety alongside older topics like drug awareness and road conduct also signals something meaningful about how Italian law enforcement conceptualizes youth vulnerability in the current period. The threats facing young people are no longer exclusively physical or chemical - they are increasingly structural and digital, embedded in the platforms and devices students use every day.
Forensic Science and Canine Units Turn the School Into a Live Learning Environment
Two activities stood out for their capacity to translate professional police work into something students could directly observe and process. The State Police's canine unit carried out operational demonstrations using dogs trained to detect drugs and explosives - a display that combined genuine technical sophistication with the kind of immediate, sensory engagement that a lecture cannot replicate. The dogs' precision and the handlers' explanations of how detection animals are trained and deployed gave students a window into an operational world they would not ordinarily access.
More striking still was the contribution of the Forensic Police, who constructed a simulated crime scene inside the school building. Officers walked students through the investigative procedures used in real cases - evidence collection, scene documentation, chain of custody - transforming a familiar corridor or classroom into a working demonstration of forensic methodology. For students considering futures in law, medicine, biology, or public service, this kind of hands-on exposure carries genuine orientational value beyond its immediate spectacle.
Orientation as Well as Education
What distinguishes this initiative from a standard civic education lecture is its dual function. It is simultaneously an awareness programme and a form of active career orientation. Students in their third, fourth, and fifth years of high school are at precisely the stage when questions about professional futures begin to sharpen. Meeting specialists from units as varied as the Forensic Police, the Postal Police, and the canine division in a single day gives them a concrete, differentiated picture of what a career in public security might actually involve.
That the event has now reached its fifth edition at the same institution suggests it has earned its place in the school's calendar on merit rather than novelty. Institutions that return annually to the same schools are making a longer-term commitment than a one-off visit allows - building relationships, updating their material to reflect current threats, and signalling to students that the engagement is genuine. In that sense, A Scuola di polizia functions as much as a sustained dialogue as it does an annual event.
