Police State Research Paper

The term police state describes a state in which the government exercises rigid and repressive controls over the social, economic and political life of the population. A police state typically exhibits elements of totalitarianism and social control, and there is usually little or no distinction between the law and the exercise of political power by the executive.
Pierre Claude, R. "Human Rights and Statistics". University of Pennsylvania Press
The inhabitants of a police state experience restrictions on their mobility, and on their freedom to express or communicate political or other views, which are subject to police monitoring or enforcement. Political control may be exerted by means of a secret police force which operates outside the boundaries normally imposed by a constitutional state.
A Dictionary of World History, Market House Books, Oxford University Press, 2000.
The term "police state" was first used in 1851, in reference to the use of a national police force to maintain order, in Austria.
Oxford English Dictionary, Third edition, January 2009; online version November 2010.
In fact, even on a local level, the use of a police force to actively maintain order, outside of emergencies, was nearly
Because of the pejorative connotation of the term, it is rare that a country will identify itself as a police state. There are several non-governmental organizations that publish and maintain assessments of the state of freedom in the world, according to their own various definitions of the term, and rank countries as being free, partly free, or unfree using various measures of freedom, including political rights, economic rights, and civil liberties. The use of the term is motivated as a response to the laws, policies and actions of that regime, and is often used pejoratively to describe the regime's concept of the social contract, human rights, and similar