General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Can we please put the discussion, whether the US is a police-state, to rest? [View all]Silent3
(15,909 posts)Do we have a lot of out of control cops? Yes.
Do too many get away with crazy shit that leaves you gasping at how they can get away with it? Yes.
But, as numerous as these stories are, what percentage of the police force acts this way? In a population of 300,000,000, how many people are subjected to these abuses? Whether that number is small or large, are the effects of the cases that do happen so chilling that a large portion of the population has been cowed in response, fearing what might happen if they "step out of line"?
How much do you fear posting this public forum that you think this is a police state, or criticisms of politicians and powerful business people?
It's a matter of degrees, but if I were forced to make a hard, yes/no distinction between whether we're a police state or not, I'd have to go with "no", because, while many terrible things do happen, people still exercise quite a bit of freedom without fear of reprisal in this country.
In fact, a lot of young people do this to an incredibly stupid degree, posting pictures and videos of criminal behavior online, things for which they should expect to pay a penalty, yet they do so without much fear. In what I'd call a "real" police state, even crazy, immature teenagers would very seldom be so bold.
To me, a "police state" isn't about police brutality and police misconduct so much as it's about a large and systematic regime of repression, mainly serving the purpose to stifle the least bit of political dissent. We've got plenty of real problems in the US -- trigger-happy, increasingly militarized police among them -- but we still are quite a way from what I think about as a police state.