Law enforcement

One of the main problems when it comes to law enforcement within the Imperium is the fact that the Emperor set things up so each local government is given autonomy to set their own laws and see to their enforcement with certain limits. The Imperial forces' interest is confined to the Imperial enclave and their starports.

What this ended up meaning early on was that criminals could effectively commit a crime and once they were on a ship and out of the system the courts where they committed their crime had no recourse to bring them to justice unless the criminal landed somewhere that had extradition treaties with them.

Needless to say, the member states looked to the Imperium for a solution to this situation.

Faced with the nightmare of establishing an official police force that would be in the position of trying to enforce the mishmash of legal codes in existence or the alternative of reversing his policy of allowing the local governments to set their own laws he instead stepped out of the box and gave them something else.

What came into being were the Imperial marshals, a group of individuals who in return for a bounty set by the local governments were empowered to seek out and deal with these criminals. These bounties would be submitted to the imperial court system for vetting before being posted to the official bounty board. The system would not accept bounties for political crimes or fabricated charges intended to bypass that rule. Once the bounty was posted any licensed marshal could act on it and collect the bounty. Most bounties were for retrieval but for serious crimes of violence Dead or Alive bounties could be issued.

Aside from the sanctioning of the marshals, the Imperium set up what the Emperor called a "bounty wagon" circuit. Marshals need only deliver their prisoners to established imperial stations to collect their bounty and the prisoners would then be transported by the bounty wagons to their final destination.

Needless to say, the establishment of the marshals lead to the formation of its dark cousin the Bounty Hunter's Guild. This body would accept contracts of any sort as long as the funds for the bounty were placed in escrow beforehand. And while marshals work under authority granted by their license, bounty hunters do not enjoy that privilege. It is a matter of Imperial policy that anyone working as a marshal is forbidden to collect guild bounties on pain of revocation of their license. 

The present location of the Grand Guild Hall is the planet Nava. Being one of the so-called treaty planets established after the 4th Imperial war neither the Talosian nor Dark Imperium claims any authority there other than within their own enclaves. As a show of panache, the Hall includes the Big Board, a display 50m high and 500m long on which it is said every open bounty is displayed. In a morbid way, the size of the present bounty on one's head has become a sort of symbol of prestige among many of the rich and powerful. The hands-down king of the board is to no one's surprise Largo Eximus himself at a level that if one were ever to collect it and survive to collect it could buy several not so small planets.

As a side note the farther into the empire you go the more you find that the local governments maintain close ties and collateral law enforcement treaties which means an officer on Tropica can act on a warrant issued on Arion. This means that for the most part, you will rarely see marshals in the inner systems.

Another item of interest is that referring back to the entry on citizenship acting as a deputy to a licensed marshell is a profession that establishes credited at one hour for every 100cr of bounty collected. so a 12,000cr bounty will bank 120 hours toward citizenship.