Many of the 'laws' were nothing but edicts that mayors, governors, unelected bureaucrats, and agencies did not actually have the legal authority to enact or the scientific data to back up the respective decisions/restrictions.
Police departments, easily fell for and went along with brutally enforcing the 'emergency actions' without question or bothering to ask "do the mayors have the authority to require/direct those actions?", or if they were even moral actions that they were being told to carry out.
It is down right scary, that there were no objectors of conscious, or police departments standing up against the authorities and standing with the people/protecting them from the authoritarianism.
Over the decades, many on the left have called the police, authoritarian. People who pointed to how many in such institutions abuse their power or go on ego driven power trips. Perchance just dismissing their calls as foolish all of these years, and always just supporting the blue was a bad idea.
As with how easily they, as an entire institution, slid into that very authoritarian role, and away from "serving & protecting" the population is down right terrifying and foreshadows a potential very dark future ahead of us under similar circumstances.