"Elves feel strongly about that too, what with the living forever, but we found that procedural adjustments need not interrupt the contentment - or, really, even come to the notice of - the people who were not presently suffering where our procedures were inadequate."

"Someone who has suffered a violent crime tends to be curious about what becomes of their attacker, if nothing else."

"Is that a curiosity satisfied by statistics on the rate of police brutality and prison rape and deaths in custody? Swift, certain, accurate justice, absolutely. But if your people need cruelty then just torture the defendants in public until the victim declares themself satisfied, don't build institutions that will do it quietly and forgettably for you, out of sight where it soothes no one."

"In Voa people are entitled to more specifics if they wish."

"What sort of information is typically requested?"

"They often ask for interview transcripts."

"I actually think you'd find an adversarial justice system really valuable to those people. The process lets more information come to light, and being a process nothing about it is contingent on the skill of a single interviewer. Maybe the reason everyone else feels satisfied that justice has been done even if the defendants subsequently endure tolerable conditions is that the adversarial justice process is better at bringing closure to victims."

"Why is it that you're so partial to the structure?"

"Well, see, nowadays we can use the arbitrary matter powers to check up on verdicts delivered before we had it, and of course a lot of researchers were very curious which legal structures best produced correct verdicts - meaning here ones that were right on the facts of the case. So they went through tens of thousands of cases and - throwing out Elves as an outlier - that's the system with the lowest rate of false convictions of innocents and it's also among the best for successful case closures - the number of crimes for which the correct person was eventually convicted. It's also much less vulnerable to corruption, and it's much more tractable, once it's adopted, to produce later gradual changes in the rights afforded criminals. Stable, orderly, not dependent on individual virtues, institutionally flexible, I really think you'd like it."

"I could make use of your statistics on the subject."

"I think it's in the giant dump of sociology papers online but we may have rather drowned your greens with that, I can have the relevant analyses emailed to you directly."

"Thank you."

Almarë arranges for Tapa's reds to hold their vote on emigration. They'll move forward with an 80% majority.

And what information do the reds have at this point?

If they have access to the internet, they have pictures of Endorë and of the resettled red neighborhood there (though the Elves are maintaining the implication that reds are segregated with suitable concern for decontamination procedures) and endless debate about whether the aliens are serious about their fairly stringent rights standards and select interviews with some relocated reds. She asked Macalaurë if she could say about his girlfriend but he thought it was unwise. 

They can get 81% of those who vote, which is most but not all.

They can't actually just decide that's adequate, they have to ask Vanda Nossëo's elections commission. Which says nope, less than 80% of the affected population is less than 80% of the affected population. 

The red websites are pits of controversy on the subject. They're not used to voting, most places - there's a couple that let them but the population is very small and they're easily turned away for procedural issues - do kids count, are babies and half-year-olds supposed to vote - why hasn't anybody come back from Endorë to tell them about it in person -

Kids can vote but kid nonvoting does not traditionally count against your participation rates for elections commission oversight purposes. It's a long trip from Endorë and someone demanded a review of teleport decontamination procedures but they can have video if they want, there's a town hall meeting on public safety in the resettled city tonight.

Video would be good.

A stressed Almarë shows to the public safety meeting that evening. "This is the prince's fault."

           "It makes them so happy -"

"Whole lot that's worth, if they don't agree to come in the first place because they notice we're hiding something and think it's something bad -"

           "He could maybe have avoided personally leading the diplomatic stuff."

"Thank you all for coming," a man at the front of the room says. "We're here to invite you to discuss, and eventually vote on, how our public safety officers should interact with your community. As you all know, right now emergency services have been prohibited from calling public safety to this neighborhood, because of concerns that no one would request medical care after or during an altercation if they expected public safety would become involved. We are considering revising that recommendation to allow public safety officers to work normally here."

Maybe public safety officers could be allowed in one red building for a while first as a test.

They're happy to work with that. Are there any buildings volunteering?

One building is less not-volunteering than the others.

" - are there maybe concerns we can productively address before embarking on such an experiment."