"You know what the police are learnin' from our demonstrations?" the Rev. Andrew Young, a top aide to Martin Luther King, asked a nearly all-black audience in Montgomery, Ala., last week. "We're showin' 'cm that the price of beatin' niggers is goin' up!"

If the Alabama police were learning about Negroes last week, the Negroes and northern visitors were learning a lot about the police.

The most striking thing about law enforcement in Selma and Montgomery is its omnipresence. Last Thursday, at 4:30 a.m., a CRIMSON; reporter left the house where he was staying in the Negro residential section of Montgomery, drove to the nearest phone booth to telephone a story to the CRIMSON, and returned. The whole trip covered about three-tenths of a mile and took perhaps 30 minutes. In the course of it, he was stopped four times by Alabama state troopers who demanded to know what he was doing.

Later the same day, I was driving along Route 80 from Selma to Montgomery. About a mile outside of Selma, I noticed a helicopter hovering above the car. Beside me was a white CRIMSON photographer, and in the back seat was a young Negro who had asked us for a ride. The top was down, and we could soon see that a man in the helicopter was looking at us through binoculars and taking photographs. He followed us closely for 15 miles, until we suddenly veered into a gas station.

After only a day in either city, the sight of a line of state troopers forty men long and two men deep, with billy sticks poised, was--if still remotely terrifying--no longer shocking. Outside Brown's Chapel in Selma one could usually count 10-20 state troopers' cars. On Jackson St. in Montgomery half a dozen unmarked cars were constantly milling about. City police walked aimlessly through the street, trying to learn when there would be a march, and where the demonstrators would head. Plainclothes city policemen, sometimes making feeble attempts to pass themselves off as newsmen, photographed everyone and everything.

While the police are omnipresent, they are not monolithic. Three law enforcement agencies are struggling for control in both cities.

The State police, under the direction of the notorious Col. Al Lingo, the Alabama director of public safety who first used cattle prods to break up civil rights demonstrations, are by far the largest and most formidable policing force in either city. The troopers are supplemented by "conservation officers," a ragtag band of rednecks, mostly from rural areas, who are anxious to beat the hell out of any Negroes they can lay hands on.

In addition, both Dallas and Montgomery Counties employ an elected sheriff and several deputies. When "necessary," a sheriff may swear in an unlimited number of possemen. In Montgomery on Tuesday it was these mounted possemen wearing denim jackets and ten-gallon hats, who trampled more than 600 demonstrators, beating several senseless. They enjoyed their work, and they went at it with rebel yells and cries of "yippee--get the bastards."

Finally, each city has a force of municipal policemen, under the control of an appointed police chief. They are generally more sophisticated than the troopers or the possemen.

The crucial difference in these agencies, however, lies not in the social and economic composition of their forces, but rather in their leadership. In both cities, the sheriffs and the troopers belong to the cowboy school, which holds that the only way to deal with the Commie beatnik agitators is to run roughshod over them. The police chiefs in the two towns, on the other hand, while not always just, use restraint in their defenses of an unjust order.

D. H. Lackey, assistant chief of the Montgomery police, is an example of the latter group. Deliberate and slow, almost to the point of dullness, Lackey seldom raises his voice even in the heat of the demonstrations. Although large, like the archetypal southern cop, Lackey's face is soft and his cheek muscles never ripple to reveal clenched teeth below. No matter how tough the situation, he always has a smile and a handshake for the reporter who bothered to make himself familiar to the assistant chief.

For Lackey, slowness is both a virtue and a tool. During the daily street demonstrations he was constantly besieged by city and state officials who urged him to "lock the niggers up." "Well," he inevitably drawled, "let's just wait a while and see what happens."

On the day the possemen charged the civil rights demonstrators, Lackey asked Montgomery County sheriff Mac Sim Butler to help him get a small crowd of the marchers back to the other side of the street where the bulk of the crowd was being contained. Whether from personal sadistic zeal, or sheriff's orders, the possemen went wild, and began to charge both groups of demonstrators.

Immediately Lackey was in the street yelling, "Hey sheriff, you've got to stop this." From then on, Lackey made it clear that he wanted no help from the sheriff or the troopers unless he specifically requested it. He has not asked for any aid again.

One evening later in the week, James Forman, executive secretary of SNCC, borrowed Lackey's bullhorn to quiet a restless mob outside the Jackson Street Baptist Church. When he bitterly criticized the police chief for calling in the posse, Lackey, who had been standing on the edge of the crowd, hesitated for a moment and then strode up to Forman.

"I'll answer to that," he declared and took the bullhorn from the SNCC leader's hands. "The possee was getting orders from the sheriff and the country solicitor," he told the crowd. "I had no control over them. I didn't want any violence, I simply wanted to contain the large group. I didn't want the crowd dispersed."

Later Lackey confided to a reporter, "I don't blame him for being ticked off about the other day. I was real upset myself. I didn't want any of that kind of stuff to happen."

During the numerous street demonstrations that violated a city ordinance against parading without a permit, Lackey always put off arresting demonstrators as long as he could. While city officials clamored for him to make arrests, he told a reporter, "You know I don't want to arrest them. They're just kids, some of 'em."

Once, when state troopers prevented marchers from picketing on the capitol sidewalk, Lackey buttonholed a reporter and said, "If they stay in the street I'll have to arrest them. Do you think there's any chance of reasoning and persuading them to use the sidewalk across the street?"

"Looks to me like the troopers are the that need to be reasoned with," the report replied.

Lackey grunted distractedly. A few second later he grinned weakly and said, " reckon you got a point there."

Selma Sheriff Jim Clark, a big man with balding head and a button reading the antithesis of Lackey. He rules his office an air of pomposity, as his brood of scream and deputy sheriffs hover reverently about radio monitor crackled with the "There's a bunch of 'em with signs head west on Jeff Davis Avenue, toward the houses." Clark flicks a switch on the and drawls, "Find out what they're doin a call me back. 10-4."

Clark's office matches his temperament. The bulletin boards on the wall are plastered congratulatory telegrams from across country. "GOD IS WITH YOU IN THE BATTLE AGAINST COMMUNIST SPIRED YANKEE AGITATORS," one Another datelined New Hampshire that Clark subject King to a "THOROUGH PSYCHIATRIC EXAMINATION." A from an Air Force sergeant in Colorado, "THANK YOU FOR YOUR MANLINE AND YOUR MANKINDLINESS."

On a counter below the bulletin board stacks of reprints from various magazines shows a Negro kissing a young white girl the caption, "Homosexual tongue-sucks year-old." A second describes a weekend Luther King allegedly spent with "his in the Bahamas. Another accuses Ralph nathy, an associate of King's, of raping year-old girl.

What will be the outcome of this police power? It is too soon to say. The of the restraining elements, like Lackey, the paranoic elements, like Clark, is far tenuous, and even Lackey is only protecting status quo. When the roar of a dozen and cycles speeding down a crowded city becomes commonplace, and the sight of a trooper gripping a billy-stick and glaring Negro becomes blurred in one's mind score of similar images, then the price of niggers is still too low.