Italy: it’s complicated. We have effectively three separate police corps that do most of the work (carabinieri, guardia di finanza and polizia) and the first two are nominally under military control. Military personnel is forbidden from political involvement, but they still exert a degree of influence (the carabinieri are effectively led directly by government, and for historical reasons have a larger presence in remote areas than the other two forces, in order to enforce control; because of this role in “keeping the peace”, they often have the ears of rulers, so to speak). Civil police (polizia) has unions, typically led by ex-policemen, which are politicized.

Policing in Italy is still mostly stuck in the “authoritarian” phase, for umpteen reasons that would be tedious to list here. Suffice to say that a country where the largest police force is effectively military police, is not exactly a model.