Criminal acts in the past, similar to later offences against public order and peace

Abstract

When national security forces in the form of gendarmes and in some places constables, began to operate on the territory of the now independent Republic of Slovenia in 1850, they detected violations of public order and peace which were very similar in terms of form and content to acts designated after 1949 as misdemeanours against public order and peace. This also applied to constables and police officers in the period between the two world wars. These violations were mostly laid down in the criminal codes of the time, in which the notion of a misdemeanour was unknown. These violations constituted prohibited acts that could be defined as violent and obscene behaviour, causing disturbance, use of dangerous objects, damaging official proclamations and state symbols, writing on the walls of buildings, hanging a foreign flag, vandalism against public premises, failure to obey legitimate measures pronounced by a public official, immoral conduct in public place, begging, vagrancy, prostitution, idleness etc. Similar prohibited acts were also laid down in some other regulations and not only in the criminal code. These codes also set out penalties and other safety measures against perpetrators, from expulsion from the place of residence, country or state to the compulsory residence in a given place. These acts were usually dealt with by local administrative bodies and certain police departments. This survey shows that the severity of punishment for these violations tended to diminish with time, as did the number of these acts and also powers conferred on the security forces in charge of control over this area of internal security.