The Emerging American Police State: Friend or Foe Behind the Badge and Uniform? In an essay, novelist and journalist George Orwell once noted, “The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.” 5 This statement encapsulates what observers saw in America’s Steel City on a momentous late September weekend in 2009.