Let's remember that the police officers have and always will beat, arrest, and generally brutalize dissenters. The purpose of law is to serve ORDER. And order in our society means big business greed, prison expansion, 100,000 dead Iraqis, etc. The cops possess those steel batons, pepper spray, and the other accoutrements of repression for a reason and their use of them is OFFENSIVE 99 percent of the time.