‘We are in a police state right now’

‘We are in a police state right now’:

“The government is watching everything you’re doing,” Whitehead said. “We are in a police state right now. The question is, can we push it back?”

One of Whitehead’s greatest frustrations in the book is Americans’ acceptance of limitations placed on their freedoms and an unwillingness thus far to fight back. He said one of the biggest problems is that most Americans are unaware of how much police interaction with citizens is changing in many different ways.

“They’re not getting the news,” Whitehead said. “If you watch just regular television news, you don’t realize there are 80,000 SWAT team raids (each year). There were only 3,000 of those in the early 1980s. There are 80,000 occurring annually now across the United States. Eighty percent of those SWAT team raids are for what we used to call warrant service, where a policeman would come knock on your door.”