Local Police Department

The Local Police Department is presented not through a formal account of its organization but through the authority its officers exercise over people they encounter. The Unnamed protagonist’s arrest, his recollection of an earlier detention, and his imagined case involving Mrs. Haagstromm give the department several different faces: an institution able to detain on suspicion, officers who can exploit that authority, and a system in which serious accusations may fail to produce consequences. The imagined effort to expose these abuses turns the department into both the object of a public reform campaign and the focus of the protagonist’s increasingly punitive fantasies.

Authority and Arrest

In one account, the Unnamed protagonist has lost track of time while walking and realizes that he no longer knows where he is in relation to his hotel. As he stands on a street corner trying to orient himself, a patrol car stops and he is arrested. The stated basis is suspicion, without a specific explanation of what conduct has aroused it. He says that he tries to explain the situation and shows his driver’s license and other identification, but the officers detain him anyway. The episode makes the gap between ordinary behavior and police interpretation decisive: being disoriented in an unfamiliar part of the city becomes enough to trigger custody.

His description of what follows is marked by confusion rather than a clear sequence. He recalls being moved among rooms, fingerprinted, photographed, and questioned for hours before being locked in a cell. He says the experience feels unreal. He does not report being beaten or explicitly threatened with physical harm, but describes the officers’ manner and attention as intimidating, leaving him feeling vulnerable to what might happen in a locked room. The account therefore distinguishes physical assault from the pressure created by detention and the officers’ control over his surroundings.

A separate recollection reaches back to when he was fifteen and had run away from home. While working on an oil barge during the war, he and another deckhand, Tom, spend an evening in Providence. After they meet a girl and walk with her toward a bus stop, two men stop them, identify themselves as police officers, and take them to a station. The girl is separated from them, their possessions are emptied into envelopes, and the boys are questioned about their origins and their association with her. This earlier episode extends the book’s pattern of police custody beyond the protagonist’s adult arrest: a young person’s ordinary vulnerability is met by separation, questioning, and institutional control.

Mrs. Haagstromm and Alleged Abuse

The department’s most consequential crisis appears in the Unnamed protagonist’s imagined campaign against police misconduct. In the case he describes, Harry and Fred stop Mrs. Haagstromm while she is driving, invoke a supposed problem with the car’s identification, and claim that they must take her to resolve it. Instead, they drive away from populated streets to an isolated area and sexually assault her. The account presents the officers’ misuse of a routine traffic encounter as a deliberate means of gaining control over a civilian. In keeping with the evidence, the incident is described here without graphic detail.

The consequences in the protagonist’s account are devastating. Mrs. Haagstromm is hospitalized and remains heavily sedated; for a time, staff hear her repeatedly plead for death. Her condition is described as a profound psychological collapse that leaves her unable to care for herself. Her family is also invoked as part of the harm, rather than the assault being treated as an event confined to the officers and their victim. The narrative thus makes the abuse consequential both in her loss of ordinary functioning and in the damage it brings to the people around her.

The alleged attackers are identified through photographs supplied by the city’s police commissioner. During lucid intervals, Mrs. Haagstromm reacts strongly to photographs of two officers, and the account presents this repeated recognition as convincing evidence of their identities. Yet the protagonist’s imagined case also states that nothing can be done because there is no admissible evidence. Harry and Fred continue serving as officers. That contrast—recognition without a legally usable case, followed by continued employment—makes accountability, rather than identification alone, the central institutional problem.

Accountability and the Protagonist’s Campaign

In a later imagined courtroom exchange, the district attorney says that he personally knows nothing about possible involvement by the two officers in the Haagstromm incident and has no knowledge of the department’s official position. The exchange does not resolve whether the department has investigated or acted; instead, it sharpens the distance between the protagonist’s asserted knowledge and the institution’s apparent lack of an official response. His imagined argument is that proving his own innocence would not be enough. He presents exposing the officers and removing them from the force as a broader civic obligation.

The campaign expands from the individual case to the procedures by which men are given guns and authority. The protagonist calls for a thorough review of how officers are selected, arguing that such scrutiny might prevent similar abuses. He also emphasizes the consequences for Mrs. Haagstromm’s family, the officers’ own families, and the public watching the case. In this imagined reasoning, police misconduct damages more than the immediate victim: it can alter how people view public institutions and long-standing social traditions. The proposed reform is therefore framed as both prevention and a response to lost public trust.

The imagined hearing offers a fantasy of institutional reversal. Court-appointed psychiatrists describe Harry and Fred as emotionally disturbed and unfit to serve, and the officers do not contest the testimony. Their appointed attorney, under orders not to fight dismissal for fear of damaging publicity during an election year, seeks clemency instead. The judge commits them to a state mental institution for an undetermined period. The Unnamed protagonist then imagines monitoring their confinement and preventing their early release. This resolution is not a neutral account of ordinary departmental procedure: it is the desired outcome of his imagined campaign, shaped by his wish to see the officers punished as forcefully as he believes they escaped punishment.

Narrative Role and Tension

The department also becomes material for the protagonist’s private fantasies of reversal. In one sequence, he imagines training police officers as dogs, making them submit to discipline and perform for an audience; elsewhere, he pictures himself defeating Fred in court. These scenes transform the hierarchy between officer and detainee, but they do so through the same coercive power the protagonist condemns. The revenge fantasies expose how closely his demand for justice has become entangled with a desire to dominate and humiliate his opponents.

That tension shapes the department’s significance throughout the book. The institution is associated with the practical power to stop, question, separate, and detain, while its officers’ accountability appears uncertain even when a victim identifies them. Against that failure, the protagonist constructs an elaborate public crusade and an imagined punishment. The Local Police Department consequently stands at the intersection of institutional distrust and personal grievance: the alleged abuse gives the campaign its moral language, while the campaign’s increasingly punitive form reveals how unstable the boundary between pursuing justice and seeking revenge has become.