Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
Wiktionary
n. A police force operating in secrecy and outside the normal boundaries of law and hidden from the public, usually in support of a totalitarian government's political policies to suppress political dissent through the use of methods such as (but not limited to) intimidation, violence, and surveillance.
WordNet
n. a police force that operates in secrecy (usually against persons suspected of treason or sedition)
Wikipedia
Secret police (sometimes called political police) are intelligence services or police and law enforcement agencies which operate in secrecy. Therefore, they have little to no transparency, accountability or oversight. A secret police organization is often used beyond the law by totalitarian states to protect the political power of an individual dictator or an authoritarian ( autocratic) political regime.
Secret Police'' (German:Geheimpolizisten'') is a 1929 German film directed by Edmund Heuberger and starring Anton Pointner, Eddie Polo and Rina Marsa.
The film's art direction was by Gustav A. Knauer and Willy Schiller. It was released by the German subsidiary of Universal Pictures.
Usage examples of "secret police".
The Soviets have done it for nearly two hundred years, with the proceeds of labor camps paying for the secret police.
For another, he was usually accompanied by a second Mercedes, a smaller one, carrying three members of the SS-SD, the secret police branch of the SS, and one member of the Sfiret6, the French Security Service, who were charged with his protection.
Let's not confuse flag wavers with the secret police of a satellite state.
The Action Squads along with the secret police rounded up the leaders and shipped them east.
SBO/1 recommended that her diplomatic cover not be tainted through direct contact with me, as he rightly suspected that I was well-blown to the Bosnian secret police, so I was not required to show her around her new patch.
Stasi (East German secret police) files showed that Bollier had not only sold timers to the Libyans, but to the Palestinians, the Red Army Faction, and Arabs in both Germanies.
The black BMW arrived at the SSD main garage in Erfurt on its trailer at four-thirty and the secret police mechanics went to work.
It was a Reuters report out of Moscow, alleging that the usual informed sources were hinting at forthcoming changes at the top of the Soviet secret police.
No Soviet on earth can survive without dictatorship, secret police, injustice and terror.