creation of the Hellenic Police integrating all former municipal police and gendarmerie staf brought new potentials for a total restructuring and rearrangement of police personnel. The constitution of the Hellenic Police essentially laid down the institutional and organizational foundations for extricating the Greek security forces from the army. Among the measures to solidify complete government control, no provision was made for a central police headquarters. At the same time, the irst two ministers of public order were army oicials. To understand both the concrete situation then and the underlying continuities, however, we need to point out that the strict political control claimed and secured by the new government was counterbalanced by a virtual lack of efort to change the work culture and democratize the workplace culture. While the irst PASOK ministers delivered a message to “stop beating people!”, the transmission process allowed for a number of digressions. As noted many years later by a special investigator in a manual used mostly inside the police corps (Chatziconstantis 2011: 19), “many police oicers [still] face the dilemma: ‘If I am gentle, they call me incompetent; if I am harsh and efective, the call me a torturer. So what am I supposed to do’”? In Law 1481/84, the new government established explicitly that the mission of all services under the Ministry of Public Order was “to protect the democratic Constitution”. To summarize this turning point in the democratization of the Greeek security forces in simple terms, the State practically forced the Hellenic Police to promise not to undermine the Constitution – and that was all. Longstanding views and mentalities stemming from the old regime were let mostly untouched. In fact, their preservation acted as compensation for the strict control secured by the new government. The police was cut of from the army but not from the military mentality. The rights to association granted to police oicers in 1987 were not enough to reverse the gradual retreat of the original PASOK spirit of “Change” and the Hellenic Police, as has been said, “by the end of the 1980s is increasingly similar to the old gendarmerie” (Vidali 2007: 787). The years 1986 to 1988 already saw a sharp increase in incidents of police violence, mainly in Athens. As a result, the popularity of the Hellenic Police within Greek society reached a dramatic new low. Those years also saw the beginnings of a peculiar vendetta by radicalized elements of Greek youth (mostly in Athens) who participate in demonstrations just for the shake of rioting (the so-called “fuck-ups”, bachala). A view progressively took shape that these hooded young people are efectively used as a branch by the police, constructing a “threat” for the police to counteract, albeit sometimes by wielding violence indiscriminately against anybody who happens in the way. Thus the ruthless violence that shook central Athens ater the murder of a 15-year-old schoolboy by a a member of the Special Guard in December 2008 did not come out of nowhere. With the society in a lumbering and incomplete transformation towards the model of a Balkan capitalist metropolis, the use of police force was progressively and informally institutionalized as an everyday practice, mostly against youth and a few speciic groups (the Romani are a special case in point). MAPPING ULTRA-RIGHT EXTREMISM, XENOPHOBIA AND RACISM WITHIN THE GREEK STATE APPARATUS | 31