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I am unsure whether this question would fit better here or on worldbuilding. Since the worldbuilding aspect is almost incidental, I figured I would try here first.

The question

This is a hypothetical situation from a story I am working on.

An 'underground' organization not known to the general public has a need to get their members on incident scenes as quickly as possible. To do this, it would be incredibly advantageous to be able to use the same lights and siren that police vehicles (and others) use. However, it is important that knowledge of the organization is spread to as few people as possible.

Assuming that they can convince whoever they talk to that allowing this is a good idea, what is the smallest set of people they would need to talk to in order to arrange this?

For now, the setting is the modern day Netherlands.

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  • This doesn't seem to be about law so much as it is about local policies, which makes it an awkward fit for Law.SE.
    – Pat W. Mod
    Commented Aug 21, 2020 at 10:58

2 Answers 2

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Is this question on topic?

Yes, it is on topic. The answer to "what is the smallest set of people they would need to talk to in order to arrange this?" depends on the country's laws (procedural and otherwise) for enactment of legislation.

Answering your hypothetical question would require knowledge of, inter alia, the following:

  • At what jurisdictional level is the use of devices exclusive to Law Enforcement (such as police lights and sirens) sanctioned in Netherlands? [national/provincial/other] My guess is that it would be at a national level.

  • Since in Netherlands the legislative power is exercised jointly by the crown and a bicameral parliament, does the initiative need approval by the upper house?

  • How many [legislators'] votes in the lower house (and, accordingly, in the upper house) are needed for approval of the initiative?

Therefore, your question certainly touches on multiple non-political aspects regarding the lawmaking in a jurisdiction.

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The subject matter might be on topic, but it is not an answerable question because it is way too broad, so is likely to be closed. The premise seems to be that these people have magic powers whereby anyone will grant their request when asked in person (if people have free will can can oppose the bill, as is the case in reality, you would have to know exactly which persons oppose the law and you would have to know that the monarch and responsible minister support the law).

The primary question is, what law(s) of the Netherlands need to be changed to allow this one organization to exceptionally use police sirens (and be legally treated "like police with sirens running") as they see fit. Simply determining what the actual set of laws is is a huge question.

The secondary question is about how laws come into existence in the Netherlands (who has to approve and how), and do you have to add extra people to the count to pass whatever consistency filter there is w.r.t. EU law. The tertiary question is whether this could be a secret law, under Nederlandse law, because if it isnt, that defeats the purpose of secrecy.

Finally, given the premise that they can "persuade" people that they talk to simply by saying "Do this", the number of people that they have to talk to is functionally irrelevant, because they can command people to do without knowing what they are doing.

My point is that without more detail of exactly what you want (and given that this isn't necessarily constrained by reality), the question is literally unanswerable because there are infinitely many scenarios that we could imagine. There are some addressable and real questions, but it's not clear to me whether the second question about the political structure of The Netherlands is on topic for Law as opposed to Politics.

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  • Thank you for your insight. Would it help if I clarified that I'm specifically interested in the minimum set of people required to change/ammend the law that specifies which organisations are allowed to use sirens and lights? I believe it's 'Regeling optische en geluidssignalen 2009'. Just for the record, the part about 'convincing' was not intended to suggest that the organization has mind control powers and can make anyone do whatever they want. I figured the question would be unanswerable if the chance of convincing specific people would have to be taken into account. Commented Aug 25, 2020 at 8:33

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