Yes, it's done wonders for the drug war.
There's plenty of evidence that poor minorities are punished way more harshly than others (e.g. "A 2013 study by the American Civil Liberties Union determined that a black person in the United States was 3.73 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than a white person, even though both races have similar rates of marijuana use.").
Start enforcing the law with the same strictness on the kids of the rich and powerful, and you'd see the laws change must faster.
100% enforcement would equal almost an immediate repeal of bad laws.
I believe you are correct when it comes to individual laws. If an individual law is bad, apply it absolutely equally and watch it change. Very cute, very succinct, and it sounds like it might work. (Makes for a great slogan even if it doesn't. See North Korea) This assumes that somehow automatic processing would constitute the same as equal enforcement. I doubt that.
The bigger problem is this: taking an individual law and publicly applying it equally was not the scenario I was describing. The average person is guilty of 3 felonies a day. Assuming that stat is exaggerated, and assuming a state where you have "three strikes and you're out", we'd all be in prison for life within the year. So that's not happening. The question on the table is not about one law or the other, it's about how to take a system of tens of thousands of laws, all unequally applied, and try to make them all work the same. If that doesn't keep you awake at night, you don't know the legal system. It's Orwellian.
There will be no huge uprising, because the system has to continue working. So what _will_ happen is that easy-to-data-process parts of the law will be enforced against people who won't complain too loudly. Let's read that as "crimes that make people feel morally superior to others" and "crimes involving easy data collection where the suspects are ill-able to defend themselves". Your car will report if you run a red light, or if you've had 3 glasses of wine instead of 2 at the restaurant. The DMV will know if you're poor and driving without insurance just to get to work -- because a local LE official will track you with a LPR. It'll be just more of the same, but there won't be any humans involved.
So you'll still see prosecutorial judgment, it just won't be evident. At all. Instead more and more people will run afoul of the law in little ways that won't make too much of a stink.
As Thomas Paine said, it's better to be the victim of a bad king rather than a complex system of government. If you're the victim of a bad king? You have somebody to blame. If you're the victim of some complex, impossible-to-understand system? You're still screwed -- but now there's nobody to point a finger at. Much, much worse.
I find it disturbing that folks would think that taking people out of the law enforcement system would be a good thing. Not only would it not be a good thing, it would be a disaster for all concerned. </rant>
