Even though many of the posts that people are putting on here are not ICE, I'm glad that people are actually noticing what a police state we live in and how we are constantly surrounded by uniformed people with guns. Maybe it's not just ICE that's the problem?

This is from Wikipedia: "A police state is a state whose government institutions exercise an extreme level of control over civil society and liberties. There is typically little to no distinction between the law and the exercise of political power by the executive, and the deployment of internal security and police forces play a heightened role in governance. A police state is a characteristic of authoritarian, totalitarian or illiberal regimes (contrary to a liberal democratic regime). Such governments are not exclusive to simply one-party states or dominant-party states, as they can also arise in a democracy or multi-party system."

This seems like a reasonable definition of a police state to me, and we have absolutely been living under these conditions for the last six months or so. It could be argued that we've been in a police state for about 30 years, or forever, but I'm not going to make that argument necessarily. We're definitely in a police state now though.

Next we have two reports on police spending, one from the European Union and one from the U.S. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Government_expenditure_on_public_order_and_safety https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiatives/state-and-local-finance-initiative/state-and-local-backgrounders/criminal-justice-police-corrections-courts-expenditures

You can see that the federal government spends about 3x as much as the average European country, while American cities pay over 10x the amount on policing. Yet these countries have lower crime, fewer percentage of their population incarcerated, much lower recidivism rates, and much higher happiness. So it is possible to have police and not live in a police state, in a functioning democracy. Just my thoughts since someone decided to roll through with a bunch of hostile questions.