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View synonyms for police state

police state

noun

  1. a nation in which the police, especially a secret police, summarily suppresses any social, economic, or political act that conflicts with governmental policy.


police state

noun

  1. a state or country in which a repressive government maintains control through the police
“Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged” 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012


police state

  1. A nation whose rulers maintain order and obedience by the threat of police or military force; one with a brutal, arbitrary government.


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Word History and Origins

Origin of police state1

First recorded in 1860–65
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Example Sentences

You could never fund it and you’d be a police state if you did.

In Iraq we deposed a dictator who led a totalitarian police state ruling by terror who headed a minority Sunni Muslim government in a majority Shiite country.

From Time

Early into the pandemic, the city pushed back against a flurry of articles suggesting that the broadcasting of public announcements to homeless encampments via drones was verging on a police state.

He rules with an iron fist and has turned the country into a police state.

The classic novel about the perils of a totalitarian police state.

A secular police state well practiced in suppressing internal challenges.

The police state system that propped up dictators from Algiers to Islamabad for decades was unsustainable.

A former Ebola patient calls the forcible isolation of returning health-care workers from West Africa a ‘police state approach.’

And I, for one, do not want to live in a country that is a "police state" for some, and not for others.

If there was violence, and then violence back, you have to blame the police state.

Having experienced what the police state meant, he would have been untrue to himself if he had yielded to it.

I don't think you can get absolute security without almost establishing a police state, and we don't want that.

You expect a responsible government to be in control after the removal of the police state.

During the time of readjustment after Joseph Stalin's death in 1953, Bulgaria's police state period gradually came to a close.

This was a book about—it is a projection into the future, supposed to take place in 1984 in England under a complete police state.

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