We saw this with the Reagan War on Drugs.
(This is where you have to teach Republicans history)
By the late 70s many of America's cities had growing crime and "ghettos". This was partly due to the increased loss of postwar manufacturing to China along with a failure of the political economy to assimilate African Americans into the economy. As a result there was growing social unrest.
And there was another problem. Reagan was planning on unwinding the welfare state, which would push more people on to the streets. This would add to the social unrest and put added pressure on law enforcement. Reagan needed a tool to protect the property of the elite minority from the burgeoning ranks of impoverished souls with no hope. This is a very standard historical model. Every time you defund the majority in favor of wealthy special interests, you need to beef up law enforcement to protect yourself.
In order to stabilize the country in the face of growing despair, Reagan created the War on Drugs so he could give Washington centralized control over the states, which would allow Reagan's brownshirts to control how the states managed their law enforcement. AGAIN: The drug war allowed Reagan to build a MASSIVE federal bureaucracy over the states. It allowed him to grow the power of government much like Bush would with Homeland Security. Like most bureaucracies, Reagan's federal drug agencies eventually became self-perpetuating, dysfunctional, money-sucking nightmares lorded over by incompetent bureaucrats. The war on drugs was an abysmal failure. Big Government made things worse. The end result was that Washington used the war on drugs to build a massive surveillance mechanism.
And what did Clinton do? He kept Reagan's wasteful, incompetent bureaucracy in place. Much like Obama would with the War on Terror and Homeland Security.
Republicans always make government bigger. And Democrats are always too timid to stop them.
.... No Really. 
