I mean, I don’t know how many police New Zealand has per capita (I think regarded as the most “free” country) however isn’t it more the application of force than the quantity of police?
If they are all directing traffic it’s not a police state.
They are there to protect the state from the population. Since population doesn't have much means to harm the state, hence police are acting more "mildly", but no way they are doing traffic regulation mostly (in fact I can count on fingers of one hand seeing cops regulating traffic in Belarus)
US has one of the lowest ratios of police force per capita - 284 officers per 100k citizens [1].
Compare to Belarus - 1442 per 100k citizens and Russia’s 515 per 100k.
[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_depend...