No country that takes on the aura or claims the valued attributes of equality, opportunity, fairness, and meritocracy could possibly be true to all or even any of these very noble traits, when the evidence thereof of incarceration rates, income and wealth disparities, public educational shortfalls, as well as the lack of safety, healthcare, and civility in so many communities clearly indicates the very opposite. In fact, while America does an absolutely wonderful job of selling the story that it is the promised fabled land of opportunity, of liberty, and of justice for all; it is, regrettably, rather poor and feeble at fulfilling those very things for the whole of its people, mainly because those that are the most powerful within the United States, do not desire to and will not share that opportunity or fairness, because they will not willingly give up what they have forcefully taken from those that they exploit mercilessly with absolute abandon.
The most appropriate way to look upon America, is to recognize that despite the fact that it is clearly the richest nation in material wealth in aggregate in the world, is to thereby look carefully and resolutely within the engine compartment of America, so as to better understand, how is it conceivable that millions of hard working Americans, aren't even compensated at a living wage; and how is it possible for a nation that initially well understood the value and importance of a free public school system, that it now has at best, a bifurcated public school system, of which, millions of its own citizens are cheated of the fair opportunity to be well educated but are instead left abandoned so as to be essentially functionally illiterate. So too, while America was late to have the courage to emancipate its slaves, it did so, through the aegis of a great President and through the great sacrifice of its people, that fought for that perpetual union of the states and of liberation, only to eventually replace that previous system of slavery, with slavery by another name, through the outright exploitation of those that are immigrants to this nation but without proper "papers", as well as though its police and justice system, that systematically "shakes down" impoverished neighborhoods, so as to keep the black man and others of color, in their place, by either incarcerating them, or emasculating them.
A truly free nation, devoid of any semblance of a police state, is one in which the citizens are free to move about in public without being subjected to an unjustified stop and frisk, and also where they are free to make decisions of import, without the long arm of the police state, boxing them into communities that lack hope, lack opportunity, lack money, and lack choice. What we have instead is a deliberately designed economic policy that necessitates that a huge underclass be exploited in a way, in which the lion's share of their anemic compensated labor, is monetized into the hands of the elite that thereby effectively controls their wages, and their freedom of movement, so that these underprivileged people can thereby be sheared like a sheep, again and again and again. The police state is required for those elites, to not only put the fear of God into the hearts of all those that have nothing, but also to assure that the rich and powerful can continue to dominate the underclass of America, till each of those that make of that underclass, has nothing further to give, and thereby are discarded as nothing more than refuse and trash.