[SampleMan]

Being stopped and searched on the street doesn't seem to have affected habeas corpus or freedom of speech in New York City. No New Yorker has been sent to a gulag for criticizing Bloomberg. That I know of, anyway...

You have an odd notion that a police state doesn't exist until people are arrested for dissent. First, if I refuse to be stopped and frisked, that is dissent, and I would be arrested, no?

That said, a police state exists when your free actions are unreasonably constrained by the power of the state. It doesn't matter whether the state's intentions are good or bad. Of course, a good king is better than a bad king, but that should not be the choice presented to free peoples.

[Zhang Fei]

You have an odd notion that a police state doesn't exist until people are arrested for dissent.

You can obviously define words to mean whatever you want them to mean. However, in common discourse, the phrase "police state" has a very definite meaning that does not incorporate most developed countries, where routine street-level weapon searches by the police are not only legal - they are standard police procedure.