however, the police decided to use them not only as guards proper, but also in other functions, sending many of them to reinforce policing in regional cities and Crete. In 1999, the irst 1,000 regular positions were created. They were supplemented almost immediately with 1,300 additional positions under Law 2838/2000. Another 2,000 positions were added in 2007 (Presidential Decree 39/2007). Law 2838/2000 speciied: “Special Guards may be assigned to staf Special Police Services or Units and Transitional Squads in order to cope with special forms of crime and search for prosecuted or vanished persons”. This is a spectacular broadening of special guard responsibilities, highly questionable if one bears in mind that these persons have not passed through the same training as the rest of the police staf. A little later, with Presidential Decree 14/2001, border and special guards both became a special staf category of the Ministry of Public Order. Their integration into the Hellenic Police contributed obviously to creating a lower-level police staf with diferent skills, origins, education and, of course, mentality. More speciically, the training of border and special guards takes no longer than four months (Rigakos & Papanikolaou 2003: 293). As remarked by Vidali (2007): “their integration or adjustment to the police system is an issue that may prove of some importance in the future”. It did. There is no question, therefore, that border and special guards are special staf categories as governed under the relevant legal provisions. Their regular positions are distinct from those of other police staf. The subsequent reordering of Hellenic Police staf mandated by Law 3686/2008 was aimed primarily at reducing diversity inside the uniformed police staf and “consolidating unanimity”; Article 13 of this law integrates border and special guards as police staf (ater an additional two-week training period), conferring on them the rank of police constable with all the corresponding rights, duties and obligations – save those of a preliminary examination. A new corps was then created in 2009, out of the ranks of special guards, to cope with the increased problems of petty crime in central Athens: DELTA (the Force of Control Fast Cofrontation). DELTA consists of police oicers who have served in the army special forces and “are the spearhead of the Emergency Unit”, as stated in a blog that bears the service’s name and shows heavily armed DELTA police oicers posing proudly on camera. The fast-moving DELTA was created speciically with the idea of preventing attacks on shops by groups of young anarchists. About 300 special guards and police oicers with supplementary training succeeded at least in containing these constant attacks. Yet the long-term cost was disproportionately greater than this operational success, as it was in this poorly educated squad that the ultra-right snake found a suitable environment to lay its eggs. Due to the intensity of social protest ater 2010 (the year of the irst Memorandum), DELTA’s operational responsibilities were extended well beyond the prevention of attacks against central Athens stores to include repression of demonstrations as support adjuncts to the oicial riot squads. It is no accident that interviews with people with a long experience of participation in or observation of demonstrations in central Athens show unanimous agree- MAPPING ULTRA-RIGHT EXTREMISM, XENOPHOBIA AND RACISM WITHIN THE GREEK STATE APPARATUS | 37