The article is mis-titled and mis-leading, and detracts from the core principle. Any law, no matter how minor, can be escalated by a resisting citizen (or a bad cop) into a bigger, more violent situation.<p>After a fair reading of the article the real argument goes something like this:<p>1) The sheer number of laws means every citizen is in violation on a regular basis. Especially for trivial things like rolling through a stop sign, selling loose cigarettes, changing lanes without a signal, etc.<p>2) Every violation is an opportunity for a police encounter. A population that has only 10 laws to obey will have lower encounter rate than a population that has 1000.<p>3) Each police encounter has a non-zero chance of resulting in violence. Be it a citizen resisting and the cops responding with violence. Or in a cop making a fatal mistake, or a cop overreacting to a situation. There is some likelihood of a violent outcome.<p>4) Improved officer training and tactics alone are a limited way to lower the per-encounter violence rate. Oversight and accountability are difficult to implement due to various institutional and political barriers.<p>5) A better, safer, long-term solution is to reduce the total number of encounters by reducing the total number of laws a citizen is required to obey. Fewer encounters mean fewer opportunities for violence.<p>My main objection to this argument is that #5 would be as difficult to implement as #4. Paring down the number of laws will take a lot of political will and capital. Changing the institutions of policing and prosecution will take just as much political will to change. We should probably do both.