Every one of those "cops" needs to eat a gun. I first flashed on the "company store" motif when "just dessert" made his first play for Beth in the cafeteria.
This is great! Another form of spontaneous social order. Another survivor group being operated under a different set of rules. I would expect a lot of these kinds of dynamics to form in an apocalypse.
This is literally a zombie society. Dawn was a vestige of the social order that had died, but she was trying to keep it alive when it's manifestly dead. Dawn's society was dead, but she was the zombie virus trying to reanimate its rotting corpse.
Anna Ghastier(sp?) coined a great term for the situation Beth found herself in: save-napped.
And John Barroman let his Leftism shine by calling Dawn a Sarah Palin-bot, and said that her attitude that you only have worth if you're operating inside her system as very Republicanesque.