For the fifth consecutive year, the 'Rummo' Scientific High School in Benevento opened its doors to the State Police for a full day of structured engagement between officers and students, blending civic education with hands-on demonstrations. The event, titled A Scuola di polizia - Education for Legality and Familiarization with the Police, drew students from the third, fourth, and fifth years of the institute, offering an unusually direct encounter with the institutions responsible for public safety. In a period when trust in institutions among younger generations is frequently questioned, the initiative represents a deliberate, school-embedded effort to build that trust from the ground up.
Building Civic Awareness Through Direct Institutional Contact
The day opened with remarks from Giovanni Leuci, Chief of Police for Benevento, who framed the initiative as more than ceremonial goodwill. Leuci stressed the practical importance of connecting law enforcement with the school environment - not simply to inform students about what the police do, but to demonstrate that institutions exist in service of the community rather than apart from it. School principal Annamaria Morante, who has consistently championed legality and prevention programmes within the institute, reinforced that framing. Her longstanding commitment to civic education within the school's curriculum gave the event an institutional foundation rather than the character of a one-off external visit.
This distinction matters. Programmes that are embedded in a school's culture and return year after year carry considerably more weight than isolated assemblies. The fifth edition of this event signals that what began as an experiment has become a fixture - one that students anticipate and that staff regard as educationally substantive.
From Crime Scenes to Cyberbullying: The Breadth of Police Work on Display
What set the day apart from a conventional awareness campaign was its operational range. Officers from several distinct branches of the State Police ran parallel activities, each addressing a different dimension of public safety.
The Postal Police - Italy's specialised unit for digital and online crime - held sessions on the risks young people face in digital environments. Their presentations covered cyberbullying, online fraud, the responsible use of social media platforms, and the protection of personal data. For students who have grown up with smartphones as a primary interface with the world, these sessions addressed risks that are immediate and personal rather than abstract. The Postal Police's involvement reflects a broader institutional recognition that crime increasingly occurs across digital channels, and that young people are both frequent targets and, sometimes, unwitting participants in online misconduct.
The canine unit brought a different kind of immediacy to the day. Operational demonstrations with dogs trained to detect narcotics and explosives offered students a direct view of investigative work that rarely enters public consciousness. The units drew considerable interest - not merely because of the animals themselves, but because of what they represent: highly specialised, methodical police work that operates far from courtrooms and press briefings.
Perhaps the most striking element of the day came from the Forensic Police, who reconstructed a simulated crime scene inside the school. Students observed how investigators approach a scene, how evidence is identified, preserved, and logged, and what scientific principles underpin forensic analysis. This kind of experiential learning carries an impact that a lecture cannot replicate. When students see investigative technique applied to a physical space they recognise - their own school corridor or classroom - the abstraction of police work dissolves into something concrete and comprehensible.
Why Drug Awareness and Road Safety Belong in the Same Conversation as Digital Risk
The inclusion of sessions on adolescent drug use and road safety alongside the digital crime content was deliberate and coherent. These are not separate problems - they share a common root in risk perception, peer influence, and the difficulty adolescents face in assessing long-term consequences of immediate decisions. Bringing police officers into these conversations, rather than leaving them solely to teachers or health professionals, shifts the dynamic. Officers can speak from direct operational experience about what drug use and reckless driving produce in practice - outcomes that statistics on a slide cannot convey with the same authority.
Road safety, in particular, remains one of the leading causes of death among young people across Europe. Addressing it within a school setting, through the voices of officers who respond to accident scenes, connects the behavioural choices students make - or will soon make - to their real consequences in a way that standard driver education rarely achieves.
A Model Worth Watching Beyond Benevento
The structure of A Scuola di polizia offers a template that other institutions would do well to examine. It combines symbolic elements - the formal greeting from a senior police official, the presence of the school principal - with substantive content delivered by operational specialists. It does not treat students as passive recipients of institutional messaging, but engages them through activity, demonstration, and direct dialogue. And crucially, it returns. Repetition over years allows students at different stages of their education to encounter the programme with different levels of maturity and different life circumstances, each time extracting something distinct from the experience.
The event also serves a secondary function that deserves acknowledgment: it acts as a form of professional orientation. For students approaching the end of secondary school and beginning to consider their futures, direct exposure to the varied specialisations within the State Police - forensic science, digital crime, canine operations, traffic and road enforcement - broadens their understanding of what careers in public safety actually involve. This is orientation grounded in reality rather than recruitment material, and it is more valuable for that reason.
