Was Ascher telling the truth?

[Arjan]

Checks and balances do work actually. If you imagine a police corpse that can execute people on the spot without a seperate juridical system, much oversight, courts of appeal etc. you can imagine the difference. It might be more effective in fighting crime until it gets corrupted beyond repair. All those safeguards have a reason.

[wardenferry419]

The corruption that we have seen within the wardens and WC has been isolated and individualistic and not systemic.
We have DuMorne, status unknown-posssibly retired warden, trying to create thug squad and doing black magic.
We have Morgan, hardcore and jaded but still toeing the line.
We have Peabody, a mind-corrupting mole.
We have Luccio, loyal but vulnerable in new body.
Finally, there is Cristos, suspect but proven.

[Avernite]

The corruption that we have seen within the wardens and WC has been isolated and individualistic and not systemic.
We have DuMorne, status unknown-posssibly retired warden, trying to create thug squad and doing black magic.
We have Morgan, hardcore and jaded but still toeing the line.
We have Peabody, a mind-corrupting mole.
We have Luccio, loyal but vulnerable in new body.
Finally, there is Cristos, suspect but proven.

But the reason Cristos 'had to be' chosen was because of systemic decay in the WC involving power blocks colliding between West and the rest.

[wardenferry419]

Within any large group, sub-groups will develop. These sub-groups will try to exercise power and influence over other sub-groups or the group entire. Does not mean that one or all sub-groups are corrupt. Corruption comes from the misuse of power not from its uneven flow or distribution.

[Arjan]

The corruption that we have seen within the wardens and WC has been isolated and individualistic and not systemic.
We have DuMorne, status unknown-posssibly retired warden, trying to create thug squad and doing black magic.
We have Morgan, hardcore and jaded but still toeing the line.
We have Peabody, a mind-corrupting mole.
We have Luccio, loyal but vulnerable in new body.
Finally, there is Cristos, suspect but proven.

But Harry distanced himself from council politics so there is a lot we do not know.

But Jim created a lot of room for himself to make parts of the wardens, say their regional in some far away country, as corrupt as he needs for story purposes.

Silent regional deviations from normal warden practices are also quite possible.

[wardenferry419]

While much is possible and detailed understanding of warden activity is lacking; what has been showed, generally, paints the wardens as a dedicated and principle group tasked with difficult actions and hard choices.

[LordDresden2]

The corruption that we have seen within the wardens and WC has been isolated and individualistic and not systemic.

We haven't seen a lot of it over time, though.  At the start of the story, the Wardens appear to be more or less on the square, but we don't know much of their overall history.

[LordDresden2]

As Billy Joel sang "It's a matter of trust." Who do you trust, the experienced and reliable warden/cop or the teenaged warlock/punk that says the warden was mean to me? One has done his duty for awhile and the other ignorantly thinks they know everything.

If I'm an uninformed, or semi-informed, minor magical talent?  Probably neither, or I might trust the warlock if I didn't know the true score.  How do I know that Warden has been doing his duty for years?  How do I know what his actual duty even is?  How do I know that Council isn't full of it and handing out lies to preserve their own power?

People who've been around the block a few times might begin to notice that the Wardens do more good than harm, but that would take some experience, and even then the Wardens are scary.

If I was mostly uninformed about How It Works, and faced with a choice of believing the Molly of Proven Guilty or a Warden who had come to kill her, I might well think that it's a choice between a scared kid who tried to do something good (and in fact did do something good in the course of screwing up), and a psychopathic murderer with a sword.

If I sided with Molly and saved her from the 'psychopathic murderer', after a bit I might begin to realize I had made the wrong choice...but that would take some time and seeing the effects in action.

[LordDresden2]

Warlocks are not human? That is exactly why being branded a warlock is something to be feared by minor talents more so because some wardens can be very creative in explaining the laws when it suits them, see Morgan.

Who did not trust his own system, and he should know.

Who also showed that the white councils attitude to fair trials is not restricted to warlocks. Nobody accused Morgan of being a warlock but he was hooded anyway and had no defense exept for what nepotism brought him. 

We know the warden counted members like Justin so expecting exemplary behaviour from all of them is not realistic. And more important thee is no appeal possible and the whole affair can be finished on site with whoever available.

So much power with so little oversight and no appeal or second opinion is scary. It is not good for people even the best of them.

And what Bob said was not a lie, with that cloack he can.

I suspect that there is at least some oversight.  We don't know any details about how the Wardens are organized, but I doubt they really have completely free hands.  But they can get pretty close, as Bob noted, and a clever one who goes bad can hide it for a long time, as we see with Justin.

[LordDresden2]

Let me suggest an alternative to there being no Wardens. Instead of trying to track, determine guilt either by their actions and/or a soulgaze, and executing them; you let warlocks do whatever they want. Wouldn't that be a nice world to live in; but, only if you are a warlock.

That's really the only excuse for the Council's policies, that the alternative appears to be vastly worse.

The question is whether the Council and the Wardens could do a better job than they do, or organizes things to produce better outcomes.  At the very least, they need to do a better job of PR in the magical world.

A person born with magical aptitude is given both a gift and a burden. A gift to use power that few have. A burden to use that gift properly. Would it be it better if novice magic users knew that the WC existed and that there are consequences and punishments for misuse of power? Maybe. But ignorance of the WC does free the novice from the responsibility that hurting others for selfish cause is wrong.That queasy feeling you get before you do bad is not indigestion it is the rumblings of guilt.

Yeah, but it's not that simple.  Yeah, killing with magic might produce that queasy feeling...unless you're defending yourself against attempted rape or murder.  Then it might seem appropriate.  (In fact, is has to seem appropriate in the moment to use magic to do it.)

Transforming another?  Yeah, we know why the Council sees it as murder, but why would a new talent?  Esp. since people can self-transform safely.

Reading minds?  Meddling with them?  Even here, it's possible for a wrong thing to seem very right under some conditions, see Molly Carpenter.  And note, too, that Molly really did almost surely save Rosie's baby from being born addicted, so there's an additional complication.  Molly didn't just think she was doing good, she really did do something good in the process of doing something bad.  The Jedi mind trick?  You're saying Ben Kenobi was a monster just for distracting an enemy?

Messing with the dead?  OK, a lot of people would recoil from that out of native revulsion...but there are people would think they could do good that way, too.  Esp. since there are gray areas even here.

Messing with time?  Well, anyone familiar with much science fiction would know how many ways time travel might cause problems, but if you'd never thought about it, or assumed that the past was fixed...

And the Seventh Law doesn't even require magic to break.  In theory, a total mundane could fall foul of the Seventh Law simply by reading the wrong book in innocence.  Think about that..  You find an old book in your great-grandmother's attic, read it, and someone decides you have to die for it.  For reading a book.

It is by no means obvious to an uninformed person that this stuff is bad, or why, or why the response has to be so harsh.

The Council does try to remove the stuff that's forbidden so people can't accidentally read it...but even that looks bad to the naïve.  'You're saying you have the right to dictate what I can do with my powers, how I can use them, heck, what I'm allowed to even read?'  'Yes.  And I'll kill you if you don't comply.'

[LordDresden2]

Well... the Wild West wasn't really the _Wild_ west we see in movies and read about in books.

But I guess I can see your point.

Also: "When you have 1 wizard, you have a wizard. With any higher number of wizards, you'll get an argument."

I like that.  A scourge of black vampires, an argument of Wizards.

[wardenferry419]

I hadn't thought what you call a group of wizards; but, an argument seems appropriate, don't it? Most of your responses I have no problem with. The only one that got me was the Ben Kenobi comment. At most, I would chalk it up to grey magic. Harry did something similar in PG to a stressed cop after the con attack.

[Mr. Death]

Better than on the Discworld, where the plural of wizards is "War".

[Kindler]

I agree that the White Council needs much better PR.

The problem with the Wardens as an organization, I think, is that there aren't enough of them. The White Council is a global organization, and a few hundred Wardens to police things. You're talking one Warden per, what, fifteen, twenty million people? Considering that they like to work in teams when handling true threats, it's no wonder that they have such a terrifying reputation. They only show up when things are bad, and when they do show up, people die. They're like plague doctors, except, you know, plague doctors actually carried the disease from house to house on their clothes.

I think that the real issue is pretty much a matter of scale. They have such a limited number of assets that there is no prevention; they're not an acceptable deterrent, and the sheer size of humanity over the past century is making their job that much harder (it's quintupled). If they had enough Wardens to have two or three in each major city, even that might not be enough, but it'd be a start. They don't have a presence like cops do—the "cop on every street corner" proposal helped (though how much of an impact it had is debatable, considering it went into effect during an economic boom and at the tail end of a pretty dramatic demographic shift) on crime reduction. Police trust is higher where people know their local beat cops. It is my belief that people don't trust institutions by reflex; they trust people, and that trust may extend to their organization over time.

Their lack of notable presence directly led to the minor talents' willingness to believe that Wardens were murdering them in White Night, in my opinion; Wardens were faceless enforcers to them, not, you know, people.

As for Arjan's thoughts on the topic, I believe that any (and every) organization is susceptible to corruption and abuse, the Wardens included. Considering the numbers involved—again, numbering in the hundreds—it is perfectly possible to introduce additional oversight without hindering their ability to respond to threats.

I do think it's notable, however, that the only confirmed outlier that we've seen on page is Peabody, the one person who seemed least likely to be a backstabbing murderer.

[Mira]

  Okay, so the Wardens are the White Council's cops...  They arrest and enforce the Laws of Magic... However they are not supposed to sit in judgement of would be law breakers, that is the Senior Council's job.  With the wars and modern times both are spread pretty thin...  Also there are good and bad Wardens, if they are took quick on the draw and a young would be warlock loses his or  her head before trial, most in the Council look the other way, makes their job easier because they feel they don't have the time to waste on a kid that no one will put his or her own head on the line for and who is a lost cause anyway..    So from her perspective, Asher was telling the truth, if she has surrendered the odds of her keeping her head were not in her favor...  The chances were also good that she would have lost her head before a trial was arranged in the first place with no questions asked..