@grrrr_shark A similar situation that this reminded me of: A (kind and most certainly not entitled) coworker has told me recently that they find ticket inspectors on public transit _and_ policy to be unreasonable sticklers to the rule (in case of police: even at the expense of the thing that the rule is expected to protect). His examples gave me the same impression.

The thing is that his experience was wildly different from mine (at least as far as tickets go; I had ~no interaction with police): I did manage to mess up tickets in public transit ~4 times over the ~8 years I am here, including once simply losing the ticket. I expected to be fined at least in half the cases, but was never fined (either got the way I messed explained, or got asked to buy another ticket when I simply lost it).

We tried to figure out what could have caused the difference, and came up empty. We're both men (he's significantly older than me). We both speak German as a third language (and mine's poorer than his). I would consider his baseline kindness and respect for random fellow humans to be slightly higher than mine. Neither of us expected any of these differences to cause people to treat me better, so this was either just luck, or something that neither of us could notice.