Rules multiply faster than the ability to enforce them.
Unattributed. The related researched finding is that enforcement capacity, not rule count, determines compliance — so a rule added without enforcement resources reduces average compliance.
In practice
- A school that adds a rule after each incident has ninety by the fourth year, and the newest is the only one anyone can quote.
- A policy library that has grown for a decade without anyone retiring a rule contains contradictions no single officer can see, which is the real cost.