The police sergeants are the officers who command the soldiers that guard the hospital and who generally communicate with the blind internees when they request resources or assistance (but typically deny their requests). Like the soldiers they command, the sergeants are frequently replaced: in some parts of the book, there is a new sergeant virtually every time the internees go outside, and the sergeants range from unnecessarily cruel (like one who hopes the blind will die and make his job easier) to reasonably empathetic (like one who directs the blind to safety rather than letting one of his soldiers shoot them for sport). Nevertheless, all of them willingly advance the Government’s cruel and unnecessary policies, and they therefore represent the way the Government anxiously persecutes the weak in order to try and cope with the blindness epidemic, a crisis it does not understand any better than the public does.