Structural discrimination in the law; oppression and revolution; some ready solutions to mitigate the harms.

Black Lives Matter. Ferguson, Baltimore, Minneapolis, Dallas. Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, and Trayvon Martin. Many more. They’re all different, but the common thread is that they are symptoms of a legal regime that oppresses minorities by putting them at the mercy of too many laws that have, taken together, expanded the reach of the State too far.

What has been going on over the past several years, and quite intensely in recent weeks, may be viewed as a revolution — sometimes violent, sometimes non-violent — against government oppression. Though the use of State violence against disfavored Americans is not as overtly sanctioned as it was during Jim Crow, or in apartheid states such as South Africa or Israel, it is nonetheless embedded in our laws, judicial decisions and public discourse.

Every law that that is enforced by police is a violent intrusion on the freedom of Americans. When a police officer stops you — lawfully or not — you are obligated to obey and if you do not he is authorized to use varying degrees of force to compel your compliance. If it is unlawful, your remedy is judicial, and as such, is not a complete or satisfactory remedy. All laws enforced by the police are inherently violent against citizens, no matter how innocuous they seem.

Any law that authorizes police to exercise authority over citizens in enforcing middle-class sensibilities targets people of lesser means, predominantly minorities. When we pass laws requiring working tail lights, or against vagrancy, or prohibiting the sale of loose cigarettes, we have expanded the power of our government to use violence against people who do not or cannot live according to those values.

For example, the prohibition on sales of single cigarettes — the law that resulted in the death of Eric Garner — is a law that enforces middle-class sensibilities about commerce, health and public order, but is applied largely in communities that have different sensibilities and needs than the communities of voters represented by the legislators who passed the law. The law has little utility beyond keeping some neighborhoods a little less chaotic. It prevents people with fewer opportunities from engaging in a little enterprising effort to make ends meet. And it results in entirely needless opportunities for the State to exercise violence against citizens of lesser means. This law and many like it are used like vagrancy statautes have been used for generations: to place poor, minority Americans within the “justified” reach of government violence; to strip them of rights under the color of law; to create a permanent underclass of citizens, primarily people of color.

Causes of and motives for this kind of subtle oppression are hard to pinpoint. For that reason, many people cannot see why the grievances are legitimate. After all, when we passed the loose cigarette law, it was not with the intent to oppress. It was with the intent to make the streets a little more orderly, and make it harder for people to engage in the awful habit of smoking. It’s for your own good.

Laws like equipment requirements on vehicles — the laws that resulted in the death of Philando Castile — are more difficult. We want safe roads, and functioning tail lights seem indispensable to that. But the cost is that poor people will be disproportionately subjected to the exercise of State power, often with physical violence, but always with economic coercion. If we remove these kinds of infractions from the purview of “law enforcement,” and make a transition to viewing them as administrative or regulatory — like a health inspection of a restaurant — we can limit the nature and degree of State power that is used to enforce these laws.

It’s important to remember that broken tail lights and loose cigarette vendors are not causes of disorder and chaos; they’re symptoms of poverty. Laws that prohibit this kind of behavior are like band-aids on a festering, infected wound. We suppress the visible aspects, but the infection goes untreated. The bandaid traps the puss and filth of poverty and inequality under the surface, until it eventually erupts in violence and revolution.

Some solutions:

(1) Driverless cars: with driverless cars, the need for enforcement of moving violations will be obviated for the most part. Speeding, running stop signs, swerving, and tailgating all can be controlled by computer. Driverless cars can also mean the end of drunk and intoxicated driving. This revolution cannot come soon enough, and we should be subsidizing it with public dollars.

(2) Transfer the enforcement of some laws from the point of a gun to the stroke of a pen. Judges and bureaucrats are perfectly capable of enforcing many of our traffic infractions without police involvement at all. For equipment violations on vehicles, for example, it is not necessary that police actually be present on the streets at all. Instead of stationing a person in a car, use a drone with a camera or a stationary camera. A person can be safely sitting in a call-center monitoring a live feed. Tickets can be issued electronically. We’re already doing this with some moving violations, such as running a stop light and speeding. It can be done for all sorts of infractions.

(As an aside, it should be a complete defense to an equipment violation of the ticketed person repairs the vehicle within a reasonable timeframe, to avoid perverse government incentives to tax the poor).

(3) Reduce the number of laws that are enforced at the point of a gun. While many laws currently on the books can be enforced through judicial action, rather than police, others need not be enforced at all. Shrinking government power by ending the “war on drugs,” which has given police power and incentive to turn traffic stops into intrusive investigations. If drugs were irrelevant, fewer stops would be as fraught with tensions and risk of violence for both police and citizens.

Additional areas we can shrink the power of the government include such quality-of-life regulations as lose cigarette sales, jaywalking, noise regulations (used to exercise power over black people with loud cars), tinted window regulations, etc. etc. I’ve lived and travelled in places where this regulation of minutia like would be unthinkable, and it does not result in chaos. It results in more freedom.

We need to reexamine a lot of these laws to determine whether they are codifying white, middle-class sensibilities at the expense of minority freedoms. Sure, the guy playing loud music in his car as he drives by annoys a lot of us, but is it worth subjecting him to the violence of the State? Not at all.

(4) Creating a more peaceable society: Blue lives, do, of course, matter as well. Police are rightfully on edge when encountering citizens in the street, because you never know who is armed. The solution to this is to reduce by 90% or more the number of firearms in the hands of the American public. Oie-in-the sky, perhaps, but utterly necessary. Fewer guns means far less risk to police during a traffic stop, and police will become far less likely to feel the need to use defensive force.

(5) Implicit bias is, of course, a huge factor in this problem. It is well documented that even those of us who are conscious of racism, who are introspective about our prejudices, still suffer from forms of implicit bias. People are terrible as cross-racial facial recognition. People make subtle assumptions about people from other races that we’re not even aware of. Young black boys are consistently percieved as older than their true age.

This problem, to me, seems the most intractable. For this reason, my solutions are more targeted at minimizing the opportunities for implicit bias to infect the contacts our citizens have with the power of government.

I don’t know if there’s any way to effectively remedy implicit bias. I believe it is a function of human cognition to categorize and make general assumptions based on those categories. It’s a necessary function of how our minds work.

The remedy seems to be to ensure that categorizations are meaningful. Perhaps more racially integrated childhood experiences would help mitigate implicit bias on racial categories.