> Groups approximately never like outsiders imposing consequences on group members.
It's also worth considering why this happens, instead of just regarding it as something people do because they're inherently malevolent.
Suppose you suspect your organization of violating some law. You think they're supposed to be using some safety feature on their equipment and they're not, or what have you. In a normal organization, you report this to the leadership and if it's a real problem they fix it, because they know what happens if you report it to law enforcement or it causes someone to get hurt and they don't want that.
Now suppose one of your members reports it to law enforcement instead of the organization's leadership. Government inspectors show up and you have to pay lawyers to deal with them, and lawyers are expensive. Reporters write negative stories about you. These things happen even if the person reporting it was wrong and there was never a real problem. Worse, these outsiders are not always that diligent and you could be prosecuted or dragged through the mud despite the person reporting it being the one who made an error. And if they didn't make an error -- if the problem was real -- that's even worse, because now you're getting convicted instead of having an opportunity to correct the problem. Many laws are even implicitly written under the expectation that honest mistakes are handled internally and only intransigent bastards get reported to the government, so anyone who goes there first is going to be a pariah.
This is legitimately hard to fix because there is a trade off between cost and accuracy. If investigators are more diligent, so they get the result right more often, they have to spend more time finding out what's really going on in an organization they don't come into it with any internal understanding of. Which imposes costs on both the government and the possibly-innocent subject of the investigation. But if they're less diligent then they'll be imposing penalties on innocent people more often. In both cases, any group is not going to want there to be an investigation and is going to be resentful of anyone who causes there to be one.
Governments often make this worse by trying to make it better and imposing penalties on people who fail to report. Because that requirement doesn't eliminate the structural incentive -- if nobody reports then nobody gets punished for not reporting -- but now the group is going to respond with more severe retaliation for reporting because you've just given everyone who didn't report it the incentive to protect the perpetrators to protect themselves and to retaliate against anybody who does.
What you really want here is to do the opposite. Limit the costs and consequences to the unrepentant actual perpetrators, and make sure they're actually guilty, so you don't give the general group the impression that they're all in the same boat and should be collectively fighting against their enemies in the other tribe.
> now you're getting convicted instead of having an opportunity to correct the problem
You have completely ignored the fact that this is literally the opposite of what has (likely) happened in this case, and is provably almost the norm in countless other cases like this. There was an opportunity to make things right by the leadership. They did not choose to do so. At every step along the way.
Even assuming that these were honest mistakes (I don't believe so), the actions taken by leadership in most of these situations tend to wring the complainant out of the system. If there's a "free market" way to resolve these problems, this certainly ain't it, which calls for regulations. If those regulations aren't strong enough to coerce the intended result (if you find out one of your employees acted in this manner, immediately contact law enforcement and let them figure it out, otherwise you're in trouble as well), then you are actively encouraging an extrajudicial mechanism for resolving these matters. Specifically, you're encouraging civil remedies vs. criminal ones.
Failure to report isn't the problem here. It's that the failure to report has no consequences on people with adequate power, who get to create their own kangaroo court of dispute and certainly resolve cases to their own benefit.
> You have completely ignored the fact that this is literally the opposite of what has (likely) happened in this case
What happens in a particular case is not what motivates behavior in the aggregate. People have incomplete information and use heuristics. If you set up a system that causes people to loath interacting with the government, the prevailing heuristics come to be about what you would expect.
> There was an opportunity to make things right by the leadership. They did not choose to do so. At every step along the way.
And that's what the system we have encourages. The prevailing rules and political climate empirically lead to this result.
> If those regulations aren't strong enough to coerce the intended result (if you find out one of your employees acted in this manner, immediately contact law enforcement and let them figure it out, otherwise you're in trouble as well), then you are actively encouraging an extrajudicial mechanism for resolving these matters.
Consider the alternatives you've laid out here.
Their first option is to go to law enforcement right away, but that immediately leads to a scandal, bad PR, legal expenses, etc. Unless you can significantly mitigate these deterrents, people will inherently have a disinclination to do this, whether it's "required" or not.
Their second option is to try to arbitrate the situation internally. This has an intrinsic advantage because you get an attempt to handle things by people who know the parties and their circumstances, and if it turns out to be a false accusation or some other shenanigans you don't get a public scandal. And if that doesn't work the first option is still available afterwards. So people are going to want to start here.
Now suppose you say that they're not allowed to start there. People are still going to want to and a lot of times they're still going to do it anyway. But once they have, they're now under much more pressure to make sure it goes away even if it turns out not to be a false accusation, because the initially-innocent people who were just trying to avoid a scandal are now regarded as co-conspirators who could be charged if they don't engage in an effective coverup. That is a helluva perverse incentive to create.
> Specifically, you're encouraging civil remedies vs. criminal ones.
Which is a trade off but not always the worst one.
> It's that the failure to report has no consequences on people with adequate power, who get to create their own kangaroo court of dispute and certainly resolve cases to their own benefit.
"People with power will use their power to their own advantage" is nearly a tautology. The question is, how do you create a system that produces reasonable outcomes in that context?
A system that causes intuitive human responses to put people into a situation that exercise of power is necessary to extricate them from it is going to both encourage that result and disadvantage people without influence, which is bad. Ideally you want a system that doesn't harm any innocent people because it's efficient and reasonable, so people don't expect to be unjustly damaged by interacting with it.
Your mindset is responsible for so much corruption and abuse. It is sad to see someone smart spend so much time on this - even worse is to imagine the untalkable things you have seen and done.
If you want systems to work they have to reflect how people will respond to them in reality. Otherwise you get unmitigated fiascos like the War on Drugs.
If you make something more expensive, people do it less. If you make engaging with the government more expensive, it's not different. Imposing costs on group members who are not themselves the perpetrators will do that. Creating a system that can ruin the accused even if they're innocent motivates people to circle the wagons.
This isn't an argument that the way people respond is normatively good. But the way people respond is what actually happens, so if that's not what you wanted, you need a different system that doesn't cause people to resist its mechanism because the system itself indiscriminately damages friendlies.
You see, it is not because something is logical that we should accept the immorality of it as a fact. You don't need to be evil because the world is full of evil people :)
You do, however, need a system that accomplishes what you want it to in practice, rather than only on paper, if your goal is to make things better rather than just getting reelected by telling people what they want to hear.
I completely agree with you. It's astonishing how many policy makers think in terms of how they wish the world to function, instead of how it actually functions.
It's also worth considering why this happens, instead of just regarding it as something people do because they're inherently malevolent.
Suppose you suspect your organization of violating some law. You think they're supposed to be using some safety feature on their equipment and they're not, or what have you. In a normal organization, you report this to the leadership and if it's a real problem they fix it, because they know what happens if you report it to law enforcement or it causes someone to get hurt and they don't want that.
Now suppose one of your members reports it to law enforcement instead of the organization's leadership. Government inspectors show up and you have to pay lawyers to deal with them, and lawyers are expensive. Reporters write negative stories about you. These things happen even if the person reporting it was wrong and there was never a real problem. Worse, these outsiders are not always that diligent and you could be prosecuted or dragged through the mud despite the person reporting it being the one who made an error. And if they didn't make an error -- if the problem was real -- that's even worse, because now you're getting convicted instead of having an opportunity to correct the problem. Many laws are even implicitly written under the expectation that honest mistakes are handled internally and only intransigent bastards get reported to the government, so anyone who goes there first is going to be a pariah.
This is legitimately hard to fix because there is a trade off between cost and accuracy. If investigators are more diligent, so they get the result right more often, they have to spend more time finding out what's really going on in an organization they don't come into it with any internal understanding of. Which imposes costs on both the government and the possibly-innocent subject of the investigation. But if they're less diligent then they'll be imposing penalties on innocent people more often. In both cases, any group is not going to want there to be an investigation and is going to be resentful of anyone who causes there to be one.
Governments often make this worse by trying to make it better and imposing penalties on people who fail to report. Because that requirement doesn't eliminate the structural incentive -- if nobody reports then nobody gets punished for not reporting -- but now the group is going to respond with more severe retaliation for reporting because you've just given everyone who didn't report it the incentive to protect the perpetrators to protect themselves and to retaliate against anybody who does.
What you really want here is to do the opposite. Limit the costs and consequences to the unrepentant actual perpetrators, and make sure they're actually guilty, so you don't give the general group the impression that they're all in the same boat and should be collectively fighting against their enemies in the other tribe.