This text proposes a description and analysis of the Italian police forces. The approach adopted specifically regards their social and political construction and therefore their practices within the political organization of society. In order to better analyse the social construction of the Italian police case, I propose regarding the police as one of the several social institutions involved in the continuous experimentation to find a political organization of society. Research into the Italian police forces has been, and is still, very rare. In this paper I refer to research that I have carried out on the Italian police forces since 1990, and also to other documents and knowledge gathered in judicial inquiries and from reliable special reports.