Episode Sixteen From Pete's Notebooks: Notes on the police in utown It's interesting to think about the police in utown. I wonder what the original idea was, but I bet this isn't it. This is Novak's idea, which is that if there are no laws here, then the cops don't need paper "authority" when they're more heavily armed and more highly trained than anybody else around here. That's a kind of authority in and of itself. In the absence of laws, there's no restrictions on what they can do here. They can shut down clubs, beat people, harrass them and monitor whatever we do if it looks interesting. When they arrest people over in the city, they frequently bring them over here to beat "information" out of them before booking them. It's not a good situation, and I can't help but think that this is not how the founders imagined it. back to the chapter