[mseebach]

But what is the proportional response to littering? To theft? To selling a too large coke? To braiding hair without a licence? To driving with an expired licence? To smoking pot?

In a world where offenders will readily comply with the punishment, you can just have purely civil enforcement, no need for a special class of sworn officers to deal with it.

This is the point of the essay: law enforcement gets to use physical, ultimately deadly, force, and this is the case everywhere, even if US cops are significantly more trigger-happy than pretty much all their peers.

If you're never comfortable using violence to enforce the law, there is literally no need for it to be a law. There is no point to employ police officers to check on the size of sodas if they are not allowed to initiate force to prevent people from buying and selling them.

On the contrary, if you are comfortable using violence, you have to own that anf accept that ultimately such violence will be deadly.