Hundreds of secondary school students in Benevento came face to face with forensic investigators, canine units, and cybercrime officers on Thursday, as the 'Rummo' Scientific High School hosted the fifth edition of A Scuola di polizia - a structured initiative designed to build understanding between young people and Italy's State Police. The event, now an established fixture in the school calendar, drew participants from third, fourth, and fifth-year classes and unfolded across a full day of practical demonstrations, workshops, and focused seminars. For many of the students present, it represented something rarely offered by a standard curriculum: direct, unmediated access to the professionals responsible for public safety.
Institutions at the Classroom Door
The day opened with remarks from Giovanni Leuci, Chief of Police for Benevento, who framed the initiative not as a public relations exercise but as a genuine educational investment. Leuci stressed the value of keeping institutional life visible and accessible to young citizens - a relationship that, when neglected, tends to produce the very distance and mistrust that erode civic participation over time. School principal Annamaria Morante, who has consistently championed civic education within the institute, reinforced that framing. Her long-standing commitment to themes of legality, prevention, and responsible citizenship gave the event a context that extended well beyond a single afternoon.
The collaboration between a state secondary school and multiple branches of law enforcement is not incidental. Across Europe, researchers and policymakers working on youth civic engagement have repeatedly identified early, positive exposure to institutions as a meaningful factor in shaping long-term civic attitudes. The A Scuola di polizia model - structured, recurring, and multi-disciplinary - reflects that understanding in concrete form.
Cybercrime, Canines, and Crime Scene Reconstruction
The range of activities made plain just how broad modern policing has become. Officers from the Postal Police - Italy's specialist unit for digital and telecommunications crime - led sessions on the hazards young people routinely encounter online. Cyberbullying, social media manipulation, online fraud, and digital privacy were addressed directly and practically, with students encouraged to think critically about their own behaviour and vulnerabilities rather than simply absorbing cautionary information. This is a register that tends to land better with adolescents: not prohibition, but informed awareness.
The canine unit brought a different kind of immediacy. Live demonstrations with dogs trained to detect narcotics and explosive materials drew visible engagement from students - the kind of grounded, physical encounter with professional practice that classroom instruction rarely replicates. Equally striking was the contribution of the Forensic Police, who reconstructed a crime scene within the school building itself, walking students through the logic of evidence collection and investigative procedure. The exercise was as much about analytical thinking as it was about law enforcement - showing how a structured methodology, applied carefully, can reconstruct events from physical traces.
Sessions on drug use among adolescents and road safety rounded out the programme, addressing risks that are statistically relevant to the exact age group in the room. The deliberate breadth of topics - from digital threats to physical danger to civic responsibility - reflected a coherent educational design rather than a loose collection of presentations.
What Recurring Engagement Actually Achieves
The fact that this is the fifth edition of the event carries its own significance. A single intervention, however well designed, does little to shift deeply held attitudes or close institutional distance. What accumulates over years of consistent engagement is something more durable: familiarity, reduced suspicion, and a clearer sense of what institutions actually do and who the people within them are. Students who attended earlier editions are now approaching the end of their secondary education having encountered law enforcement not as an abstract authority but as a professional community with specific skills, ethical obligations, and operational realities.
There is also a quiet orientation function at work. For students deciding what to study or where to direct their professional ambitions, exposure to the distinct specialisations within the State Police - forensic science, cybercrime investigation, public order, working with detection animals - opens lines of possibility that careers guidance alone rarely surfaces. The event, in this sense, serves both civic and vocational purposes simultaneously, without reducing either to the other.
What the A Scuola di polizia initiative models, above all, is a straightforward proposition: that trust between citizens and public institutions is not a given, but something that requires sustained, deliberate cultivation - and that the most effective place to begin that work is the classroom.
