system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: A true police state

I hear all this talk about police states and debate over whether America is turning into one or not. I'm not saying we are or aren't, I'm just trying to grasp what the definition and life of a true police state is.
gpt
Some examples of police states in the past are the USSR, Nazi-era Germany, the Khmer Rouge, Pinochet's regime, stuff like that. It's when the government (usually led by a dictator) uses the military and police to enforce a very strict and repressive set of laws.

The things that typically go out the window in a police state are freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of thought, and the right to a fair trial. If the police are coming around and throwing anybody who doesn't agree with the ruling party's politics in jail, that's a police state.

The people who believe that the US is turning into (or is) a police state point to things like the NSA surveillance and Guantanamo Bay. They'd argue that the fact that our government is snooping on people who potentially are terrorists is a form of "thought policing," and that since you can be thrown in Guantanamo without a trial, they could start (or already be) arresting people for "suspected terrorism" without a trial. There are also people who feel that the government will unfairly target people with certain political views and try to arrest them for spurious reasons: it happened a lot in the civil rights movement, for instance, and a lot of people in the legalization movement right now would tell you that people who are pushing for legalization get an unfair level of scrutiny from law enforcement.

This is also something that gets mixed up in a lot of conspiracy theory type stuff. Plenty of people would be more than happy to tell you that the government's been disappearing people for decades and that there are secret CIA-run brainwashing camps and stuff.