Which is why we, in principle, regulate the police much more than moderators. The classical ideal of policing is that the most the police can do is apprehend you and put you in front of a judge and jury. The jury are specifically not people who spend all their time with criminals, so they should be able to act as an effective check on the policeman's instincts. Then we have all sorts of procedures and laws and rules of evidence and oversight and so on, to try and guide the police into doing their job well, and protect people who are caught up by mistake.

Moderators operate purely on the Judge Dredd model.

But then, in reality, the police operate in a 90% classical, 10% Dredd sort of way (for values of 90% and 10% that vary by location). They can mete out small punishments without going to court, oversight is not very effective, etc.

> When a police officer gets it wrong, you're dead.

Or, as often happens, they're dead. I don't envy members of a profession that have to get every life-and-death decision right in real time on a daily basis.

That's a fair point, although statistically the job of police officer doesn't crack the top 10 in most dangerous careers.

Similarly, a vanishingly small proportion of citizens (as opposed to bad guys) have a life-altering bad experience with the police.

It'd be interesting to see real numbers, but I suspect officers on the beat get the short end of that stick.

The latter is why policing often fails in the absence of serious, dedicated, time intensive protocol development and (more so) training dedicated to countering this effect.