[DanBC]

Police states don't exist because they have huge numbers of police officers, but because large parts of the population collude with them.

So, while the UK isn't an authoritarian police state it does have too many CCTV cameras and a large segment of the public likes them. This thread has had people asking for more CCTV; other threads suggested the local authorities using CCTV and human surveillance to check that people applying for a school place lived in the catchment area for that school.

We have a very large police DNA database and we see people resist attempts to scale it back. You even sometimes see large groups of people volunteer to have their DNA taken to rule themselves out of a high profile crime. And that's even though we know that a DNA database should probably have as many profiles of criminals as possible, and a s few profiles of non-criminals as possible, just because data handling.