D&D: Angelic Preservation
The mayor looks annoyed and says, "If you want to condone banditry, then it sounds like I do need to hire someone else. What you first described is a very far stretch for one. For another, it wouldn't last long since, if you are in league with the goblins, you won't be for long. You would have to turn them in to get paid and we would not release them to you for continued banditry. As for the second thing, banditry oft winds up in death. The fact nobody has died yet is both extremely fortunate and rare. If people want to interpret attempted murder as sneezing, then they deserve the full penalty of the law anyway. Ma'am, have you any experience with running a town? Or for that matter, any experience with watching the scenarios you described happening? If you do have experience watching those things happening, like a certain friend of mine, then you know that those extremes happen more when you continually execute citizens. Not when you execute outsider, monster-race, nobody-cares-about-them bandits."
Timothius says, "What if we pay for the food ourselves and bring them in?"
The mayor says, "How you bring them in doesn't matter. As long as they are arrested and brought here to our jails to be executed."