I lived for quite a while in a place where people were regularly pulled off buses by soldiers for “looking decadent” and beaten. It was a place where the police could see you in the market and think you looked suspicious, and follow you home and search without a warrant.
It was a place where people looked over their shoulder before they said anything political. It was a place where you didn’t want to look or act differently from everyone else. You could be jailed and beaten and not heard from for weeks. There was a constitution and all, just no one to enforce it. There was midnight curfew and a permanent state of marshal law.
That place was South Korea in the seventies. I was a soldier in the US Army there for 5 years.
Given my experiences there and the history of the last century and the foundations of our own country, I am inclined to look upon the government, any government, with the upmost suspicion.
The government had search warrants in this case.
What’s happening here is not the scenario you’ve observed overseas.