<HTML>Many of my friends' relatives are cops; a former sister-in-law was a sherrif's deputy, and a former brother-in-law was a prison guard.  They are pretty much all pricks.  Induction into prickdom is part of the job training.  Racism is rampant among cops, whether rural or urban.  The most blatant examples of racist behavior I ever saw occurred when I lived in LA and saw how my white friends could smoke joints in the open daylight, but mexicans and blacks were routinely harassed and slapped around by cops (of every color) for doing nothing or next to nothing wrong. Yeah, maybe we'd all be pricks if we had targets on our chests, but maybe prickdom is a trait that makes many people self-select a career in law enforcement, and from what I hear the indoctrination and socialization of police forces certainly maximize and reward the prickdom. And cops emerge from property relations--the need to protect unequal arrangements of property as well as contain the anomie and alienation of a class society.  I'm not really concerned with whether post-capitalist societies will need cops...they probably will.  I'm concerned with the pricks in blue in the here and now... stannard</HTML>