State Police

State Police are the visible state-level enforcement arm of the Long Walk. Their presence converts an abstract competition, governed by speed requirements and warnings, into a controlled public corridor in which the Walkers’ movement, contact with outsiders, and continued survival can be regulated. They appear at checkpoints and along the route, sometimes as part of an orderly security apparatus and sometimes as embarrassed officers struggling to contain the crowd’s sympathy.

Position Within the Security Apparatus

State Police operate within a larger system that includes guards in khaki, computer terminals, soldiers, Federal Squads, and the authority of The Major. At the starting gate, a guard takes Ray Garraty’s blue plastic identification card from his mother and feeds it into a computer terminal, which returns his registered identity and address. The scene presents participation as an administrative matter before the event becomes openly lethal: the state first identifies and records the boy, then places him inside its machinery. Garraty understands that the state’s apparatus has progressively bound him to the event until the final deadline has closed over him.

The Long Walk also possesses a military scale that exceeds ordinary local policing. Stebbins recalls seeing an earlier Walk end sixteen miles beyond the New Hampshire border, where the State Police were augmented by sixteen Federal Squads because immense crowds had gathered along fifty miles of road. More than twenty spectators were trampled to death while trying to move with the Walkers. In this recollection, State Police are not merely traffic officers; they are one component of a force assembled to preserve the event’s boundary, contain its spectators, and protect the state’s control over its termination.

Regulation of the Route and the Crowd

The organization’s authority is especially clear when ordinary civilians attempt to intervene. In Caribou, Percy’s mother breaks through the police cordon and moves directly among the Walkers while shouting for Percy to come home. She unintentionally trips one of the boys, and the soldiers prepare to draw their guns before a police officer catches her in an armlock and drags her away. She is then placed in a police cruiser. State Police therefore defend the route not only from deliberate attack but also from parental grief: private attachment becomes an obstruction when it crosses the prescribed line.

The same boundary becomes unstable during the watermelon incident involving Dom L’Antio. Several Walkers, including Abraham and Collie Parker, run toward the shoulder to receive free watermelon, even though they are moving faster than the required pace in the wrong direction, and they are warned. State Troopers appear to restrain Dom when he tries to distribute the fruit. One officer reaches for the watermelons, another slams the wagon’s cargo door, and the officers hustle Dom and his pink slices away from the sidelines. Their intervention preserves the rule against stopping or reversing course, but it also exposes the absurdity of enforcing lethal discipline against a harmless gift.

Unlike the disciplined Long Walk soldiers, the Troopers are visibly affected by the confrontation. Their faces are red and embarrassed as the Walkers curse them and the crowd begins to boo. A woman throws a transistor radio at one officer, knocking off his cap, while the crowd attempts to impede the removal of Dom. The Troopers nevertheless continue, and when Dom breaks free and runs back toward the Walkers, one of them tackles him around the knees. Their embarrassment does not weaken their institutional function: even when public feeling turns against them, they restore the separation between the event and the people watching it.

Relation to the Walkers and the Soldiers

State Police differ from the soldiers who directly execute Walkers, but the distinction does not make their role neutral. The soldiers push aside the boys surrounding Ewing, drag Ewing to the roadside, restrain him, and shoot him when he falls below speed for the last time. The killing is described as competent official work, while the remaining Walkers immediately understand the result statistically: two are gone, and the odds have been infinitesimally altered in favor of those still walking. State Police help maintain the public and spatial conditions in which this procedure can continue, even when the evidence does not assign them the actual shot.

That division of labor is stark during Hank Olson’s attack on the halftrack. Olson climbs onto the vehicle and seizes the barrel of a soldier’s gun, while the soldiers bring their weapons around in coordinated formation. One soldier shoots Olson through the belly, yet Olson continues climbing and grabs the gun that fired. The scene shows the military side of the enforcement system as an organized response to bodily defiance; the State Police belong to the same wider security order, though their documented interventions are more often cordons, arrests, and crowd control than executions.

Institutional Consequences and Narrative Significance

The organization’s effectiveness depends on making state violence look procedural. Identification is computerized, movement is measured, warnings are issued, and bodies are removed. The Major’s raised hand suspends the hundred boys in silence before he gives the starting command, and later he stands in a jeep, saluting as he approaches Garraty with the Prize. Between those ceremonial moments, State Police and other enforcement personnel keep the road available for the event and unavailable for ordinary human interruption.

This system steadily converts persons into administrative units. After Ewing’s death, the surviving boys think in terms of adjusted odds and an uncertain body count. After Olson’s death, Garraty protests that Olson was alive when the soldiers shot him, while McVries reduces him to a number and says that his death merely brings the survivors closer. Near the end, Garraty imagines the official record that would result if he bought his ticket: his name, number, mile of elimination, and a brief human-interest story identifying him as Maine’s Own. State Police do not author that record, but they are part of the machinery that makes such reduction possible.

Their final significance lies in the contrast between local police power and the event’s theatrical grandeur. The crowd may cheer, boo, throw objects, or try to shelter a grieving mother and a watermelon seller, yet the security apparatus repeatedly reasserts the route’s rules. By the time The Major’s jeep reaches Garraty after Stebbins’s death, the organization’s work has helped produce the most extreme form of order: a road cleared of every other Walker, with the last surviving body moving toward an official reward that is inseparable from the state’s power to end him.