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Every time the news tells you that an entire city is being put “on lockdown” by police, you should keep in mind that “on lockdown” is a phrase that they have taken from the vocabulary of prison wardens, referring to a condition in which inmates are temporarily completely restricted in their movements and confined to their cells, in order to allow prison guards to conduct searches or contain and control what the inmates are doing. If the police have the power to put a city “on lockdown,” then what does that make the city? And what does it make the innocent people living in it?