Definition of "police state" [police state]

• A state in which the government exercises rigid and repressive controls over the social, economic, and political life of the people, especially by means of a secret police force. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "From the end of the Six-Day War, Israelis have faced the same choices the founders struggled over in 1948: Israel could be a Jewish police state that spans all the biblical land of Israel, a democracy covering all the land of Israel that renounces its Jewish character, or a Jewish democracy that rules only part of the historical land and cedes the rest to Palestinians.21 Decades later, Israeli leaders have yet to implement an answer to this question."
• "I think it was damned important that there wasn't total submission to this police state approach that these Citizens Council people and Ross Barnett tried to blanket that state with."
• "Uneducated and unrefined, he understood power and wanted to turn the "happy barracks" into a police state run by him."