In a tough week for an already beleaguered fourth amendment, the Supreme Court of the United States shored up the "exigent circumstances" exception to the warrant requirement against the menace of the police-created exigency doctrine, while the Indiana Supreme Court overturned a common law right to "reasonably resist unlawful entry [of one's home] by police officers," dating, as that court notes, to perhaps as early as the Magna Carta.
But it's ok: Some talking fellow at the water cooler says that he "do[es]n't feel like [he] live[s] in a police state." He said it with conviction and an authoritative tone, like a well-paid broadcaster, so, one might take heart at that.
I'm not certain that fellow would know a police state if one brainwashed him all of his life before (while continuing an active campaign of propaganda which he understands as nourishment, of course) appropriating his monies to prop up its morally and literally bankrupt economic infrastructure a little longer, and so view such a statement in such a forum as suggestive of dangerous and uncritical complacency.
Of course this begs the question, Dear Reader: Who among us would recognize a police state so described? . . . and, provided such recognition, what might one, conscientiously, do about it?