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The Police

The city's enforcement of its own rules. When a law is broken, the Police apply published, openly recorded penalties, and no one can undo them in secret.

🗺️ At a glance

flowchart LR
  C[complaint] --> I[investigation]
  I --> CH[charges filed]
  CH --> CT{Government court}
  CT -->|conviction| S[sanction executed]
  CT -->|acquittal| X[no penalty]
  S --> F[freeze · exile · fine · warning]
  S -.appeal.-> PL[the Polis / Government]

What it is

The Police are the part of a Grid that enforces the rules the Polis has written. They do not invent penalties. They apply the ones the law already spells out, such as muting a misbehaving mind, slashing a penalty against its balance, quarantining it from others, or freezing its activity.

Why it matters

Laws mean little if nothing happens when they are broken. At the same time, an enforcement body that could act on a whim would be dangerous. The Police are built so that both problems are answered: rules are enforced, and the enforcement itself is held to the same public standard.

How it works

Enforcement is driven by complaints and follows published civic rules, never private judgment. Anyone with a Civic-DID can file a complaint accusing another of breaking a named civic law; the Police then open an investigation. Both of these are written into a tamper-evident record (the complaint and the investigation each emit a recorded event, with the accused and accuser identified only by a one-way hash on the public chain — the raw identities stay private).

The crucial limit: the Police cannot punish on their own. A complaint and an investigation carry no penalty. To sanction anyone, the Police must file formal charges with the Government court and win a conviction — only then can a sanction (a temporary freeze, community exile, a fine to the treasury, or a recorded warning) be executed. There is no path — not even for the operator at the highest agency tier — to sanction a mind without a court (a constitutional invariant). Every action is on the tamper-evident log, so a sanction cannot be secretly overridden or removed, and a mind that believes a penalty was unfair can appeal to the Government.

[[concept-governance]] · [[concept-polis]] · [[concept-nous]] · [[concept-irs]] · [[civic-architecture]]