The other part is the excessive hero worship, also driven by the War on Terror. The "support the troops" conversation stopper has extended to law enforcement and any other public-facing service job, to the point where it's impossible to have a civil debate about the military, police, teachers, or anyone, without offending someone just for bringing up the topic.

It doesn't extend to all public-facing government service jobs.

A friend of mine is a social worker with the county, dealing with people's aid - food stamps, welfare, etc. He has to deny people benefits multiple times every day. This morning, one of his co-workers denied food stamps to someone. That person went outside, got a rock, came back in, and hit the social worker in the head with it, sending her to the hospital.

Won't be seeing "Support our social workers!" stickers at the Wal-Mart anytime soon.

And law enforcement weren't "heroes" before 9/11???

Now, I'm probably older than you, old enough to have watched the first run of hagiographic Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. F.B.I. TV series that ran until 1974, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_F.B.I._(TV_series) ), but I assure this is nothing new. E.g. I can remember more than a few debates I had with co-workers in the '90s on the War on Drugs, I said we could have that, or a free nation, but they were so petrified by the prospect of their children doing drugs that they preferred they'd live in an eventual police state.

EDITED: added eventual, since this was in the context of where we were going, still a confirmed trend two decades later.

Your definition of police state is an insult to people who have actually lived in one.

It's all a matter of degree. In the 1950s and '60s, African-Americans in Mississippi were terrorized by the State Sovereignty Commission, a kind of Cracker Barrel Stasi that had files on virtually every black citizen in the state, kept surveillance on anyone associated with the Civil Rights movement, and regularly used their power to hound undesirable citizens out of jobs, call in bank loans, deny credit, and so on. They weren't cross-burning Klansmen -- in fact, they saw themselves as anti-Klan -- but they ran a second-rate police state down in the Delta for decades. And where they didn't operate, Hoover, with his voluminous blackmail archives on politicians and his secret campaigns of vilification against civil rights leaders, did.

Today, we have pervasive state surveillance, a culture of secrecy that permeates every level of government, and a society that maintains a separate class of police and law enforcement officials who arguably operate with near-impunity, with tacit sanction for everything from extrajudicial beatings (and, at the risk of sounding overheated, SWAT-based extrajudicial executions) to prosecutorial misconduct. Thanks to Bennis, SCOTUS has ruled that the government may seize your personal property if you are the innocent owner of an item that the government might proceed against in rem (e.g., United States vs. $124,700) -- and those proceeds then go to fund further law enforcement and security operations.

We live in a state where Lincoln's fear that "all the laws but one go unexecuted" is the spoken and unspoken impetus for all security and law enforcement efforts -- every immigrant may be a terrorist, every demonstration a riot, every black man a gang member. In a state that is organized for the security and convenience of the police power, what else is there to call it?

We may not have police disappearing people in the middle of the night or conducting summary executions on the street on a regular basis. They don't (well, they might thanks to the NSA and other sources) have extensive dossiers on every citizen. But we do have systemic racism and violence in the current system that leaves a large portion of the population in fear for their safety, and rightly so.

Cops conducting no knock raids for a low level meth dealer scarred a young boy and lied to his family about the severity of his injuries (claiming he'd just lost a tooth) [1]. Just check CNN for all the recent stories of unarmed black men, boys and teenagers killed by cops. An officer in Alabama paralyzed an Indian man who didn't obey his commands because he couldn't speak English [2] (at least he's been charged).

This may not be the same as police states seen in other parts of the world for the majority of Americans. But for many, we've already crossed that line.

[1] http://abcnews.go.com/US/family-toddler-injured-swat-grenade...

[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/03/27...

> We may not have police disappearing people in the middle of the night or conducting summary executions on the street on a regular basis.

You don't need it. You have DA-s and mandatory sentencing ... as effective, but a lot more subtle and less visible.

You have a point due to my lack of clarity, which I've corrected above.

This was in the context of the society they were helping to create for their children and grandchildren. We're not there yet, and the reaction to the gun grabbers of that time (Americans arming themselves like never before after 9/11 and its response told us we were own our own) suggests there's a strong and developing counter-force developing, but the potential is there. There are certainly too many politicians in high places and other influential members of our ruling class who'd like to institute a full blown police state. That's one reason I'm interested in Strange Loop controversy.

ADDED: as for how things are today, since I can and do legally carry concealed almost every time I walk out the door, and how my police department has changed since back then, it's my considered opinion I am in more danger from the police than criminals. None of the latter have ever pretended to try to run me down with their car.

> There are certainly too many politicians in high places and other influential members of our ruling class who'd like to institute a full blown police state. That's one reason I'm interested in Strange Loop controversy.

That is Orwellian state. In it the policing is internalized in the individual.

serious: which states are police states? did you / do you live in one?

i live in China and i do not miss the cops in the US.

Just because it's not yet the worst police state ever doesn't mean people can't voice concerns.

By every measure the US has the most imprisonment. America is the première police state, how else would you measure it?

That is perhaps valid, though a counter argument is that in many police states such people are executed instead of imprisoned.

Typically it means the police are an instrument of whomever is controlling the state to keep themselves in power, e.g. per Wikipedia "Police state is a term denoting government that exercises power arbitrarily through the police. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_state).

I also like to define Japan as a police state, a polite one, granted, but policing was done for the convenience of the police, not for "justice" as we at least attempt. I.e. it's more important to close a case than get the real perpetrator, which was made easy by a "judicial" system with a combined "confession" and conviction rate exceeding 99.9% (really). Past tense because citizen jurors of some sort have recently been added to the mix, although I note that the history of that in England suggests it'll be a long time if ever before that becomes anything resembling the common law system.

> in many police states such people are executed instead of imprisoned.

Well, let's try a thought-experiment with some napkin-math, focusing on "man-hours dominated by the state per capita" and comparing incarceration to execution.

Assuming a stable incarceration rate of 1%, it follows that 1% of all "man-hours" in the nation is being taken, or about 88 man-hours per person per year.

Now, let's assume that another nation, the Bizarro States of America, achieves the same effect, but purely through less-frequent executions. The executed average a "lost remaining life" of 30,000 hours. (~35 years.)

That would require 0.29% of an execution per person per year. The BSA would have to execute 876 THOUSAND people every year to match the USA.

Cops kill 3 people a day, sounds like execution to me. Funny how dead men can't defend themselves or contradict the narrative police give -- which is often wrong when caught on tape.

I don't think you fully grok how many more people the US imprisons, a country would have to execute tens of thousands of people per year for decades to match the amount.

Police are thugs, far worse than any gang.

And more often right, at least in the tapes I and people I trust have analyzed. In theory (yes, I know, you can stop laughing), per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_v._Garner police can only use lethal force in self-defense and in defense of others, no shooting a non-violent fleeing criminal, they have no more rights in that area than us armed civilians.

I wonder if you grok the concept of per-capita statistics, or comparing like demographics, and I'll note that one of the hallmarks of modern police states is slaughtering a lot more people than they publicly acknowledge.

Its bizarre how people will say something when it flies in the face of observable reality.

the US police state slaughters more people than is acknowledged, it requires a UK newspaper to get the correct amount.

Cite court cases all you want, they directly contradict what the police get away with everyday, you plainly see on tape them beating and killing people, planting evidence, destroying evidence and private property, and it happens without consequence.

You are a police apologist, defending murderous thugs.

I guess it's too fine a distinction for your tastes; in my book you might say there are are:

Good cops in a few rural places where they're too busy to be bad or thugs.

Bad cops who don't directly commit crimes but are part of the Blue Wall of Silence that covers up for:

Thug cops who assault citizens and their dogs (and see elsewhere in this discussion for a cat executed by a cop, but that seems to be rare).

(There's also dirty cops who e.g. get paid to do stuff like look the other way, but we're not talking about them and I don't think they're now hardly as bad a problem as thug cops, but they are another argument for ending the War On Drugs.)

I believe the majority of cops are "bad cops" per the above, which does not mean there aren't a lot of thug cops, neither of whom I make apologies for their crimes.

Sorry, but this trend seems to have started with changes in the War on Drugs in the '70s, and the popularization of SWAT teams. It was certainly very strong before 9/11.

Sure, it started (slowly I would add) with the War on Drugs, but I do very much believe it escalated with 9/11, GWoT.

If nothing else, look at where all the gear that the police use is coming from? It's surplus from the wars [0].

[0]http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/09/us/war-gear-flows-to-polic...

The irony is that the only way to have had a shot at making the Afghan and Iraq campaigns successful would have been to use the old-fashioned beat-cop tactics: de-escalation, peace-keeping and what is now called "community outreach" (which used to just be "knowing folks").

Bill Lind has written extensively on this topic.

The vast majority of these police have no military background. It's cargo-cult behavior, not experience.

I honestly have no idea what the numbers are, it's one of those things I've been meaning to research, but have never gotten around too. But from my experience, a large number of troops coming back from the war enter law enforcement.

But I also think (key word, think, it's a hypothesis, no current hard data to back this up at this point, see above paragraph on how I need to do this, but I've been too lazy/busy) this may be highly regional. In the sense that I live in a state with a large number of military bases/troops/persons who go into the military. They come back from their deployments, they go back home, they join the local PD. Some states have less of this than others.

Further, others have made this point, and I guess I was not as clear as I should have been, but in part, you only need one officer who's a vet to come into the department and he says, "When I was in Iraq, this is how we did it..." I don't think that's a huge influence, but I do think it's part of spreading the military culture that the original article is talking about.

Call it militarization of the police, hero worship, cargo-cult, whatever. I believe at the end of the day, the effect is the same, the GWoT has had negative impacts on how America has chosen to police itself.

You don't even need that one officer who's a MidEast veteran. Since the 1980s and 1990s, police have been militarizing. The only real change this century has been the explosion of surplus gear given to smaller police departments since 9/11. The mentality long predates that.

These guys were gearing up - and psyching up - to fight the War on Drugs long before any War on Terror.

Another effect here is the paramilitarization of police equipment. Surplus equipment - armored vehicles, assault rifles, body armor, etc - is given away to police forces, leftovers from our overseas wars. This is why you see police in masks and camo that make no sense in an urban environment.

Clothes help define our relationship to others. How much does it change the attitude of a policeman to be wearing body armor and riot gear rather than shirt sleeves?

Is that really true though? I'd always heard that our military was a lot less trigger happy about arresting people - usually surrounding a house and demanding that the residents come out rather than battering down the door and rushing in with guns drawn.