the later inherently implies using violence to suppress people
All laws that you want to be strictly enforced, requires violence. This is why people should ALWAYS remember when making laws: "Is this worth killing for?"
I remember some years ago on HN people discussing about a guy that got killed because he bought a single fake cigarrete. IT goes like this:
You make a law where "x" is forbidden, penalty is a simple fine. Person refuses to pay fine. So you summon that person to court, make threats of bigger fine. Person ends with bigger fine, refuses to pay anything. So you summon that person again, say they will go to jail if they don't pay. They again don't pay, AND flee the police that went to get them. So the cops are in pursuit of the guy, he is a good distance away from the cops for example, then they have the following choice: Let him go, and he won, and broke the law successfully... Or shoot him, the law won, and he is dead.
This chain ALWAYS applies, because otherwise laws are useless. You can't enforce laws without the threat of killing people if they refuse all other punishments.
I don't know if the guy you were discussing with is right or not, if digital era result in the need of "ruling with the iron fist", but make no mistake, there is no "strict law enforcement" that doesn't involve killing people in the end.
Thus you always need to think when making laws: "Is this law worth making someone die because of it?"
Your whole post falls apart right there.
Person 'x' refuses to pay a fine - OK, well there are mechanisms where a fine can be automatically applied in some cases, or taken from their assets by court order, or docked from pay. In some places bailiffs/repo men can be called to take assets after fines have been delinquent for long enough.
Deadly force is not really the backstop position to a fine, even a 'strictly enforced' one.
Jacob Blake was shot in the back by an officer and it was justified by saying he was walking to his truck and there may have been a pocketknife in said truck.
Charles Kinsey was shot in the chest for no reason other than being on-scene while another mentally disabled person blocked traffic. He stayed to advise officers that the person blocking traffic was holding a toy firetruck, not a weapon. Kinsey asked the officer why he was shot, and the officer replied, "I don't know."
>Deadly force is not really the backstop position to a fine
It is, though. All of the things you listed as alternatives to force are actually escalations of force, and at the end of the day you either pay the fine or go to jail and when they come to take you to jail you either come along quietly or get beaten and maybe killed. The backstop of all law and order is a state-sanctioned monopoly on violence.
This is just not true.
It's such a reductionist argument that it's nonsense. You either pay the fine or ... they find a way to get the money outside of direct payment and if they can't because you have no assets or income then most often the fine goes unpaid, sometimes for many years.
Jacob Blake and Charles Kinsey were Americans, right?
Your society has a violence problem and I don't think ought to be used as any sort of example. If the initial claim was "enforcing any law may cost lives in a broken society in which the police can murder with seeming impunity" that's a very different proposition.