everyone ignoring it
Perhaps I was unclear - there are still government law enforcers. Who will still go
attempt to find people at their known addresses and locations and do whatever investigation they can afford. It's not 100% left up to the locals.
So completely ignoring it simply means that the government will try to recover the accused themselves, but if they fail, they're eventually going to go arrest all of the rest of you and go to trial anyway. Ignoring doesn't make it go away.
If you want to make sure you aren't arrested or convicted, you have to actively do stuff:
1) Act preventatively in your community group to convince others to be lawful.
2) If something happens, making efforts to find the accused.
3) Alternatively, going into hiding. Which is a form of resistanc that could happen, but is NOT "just ignoring it." However, this should be rare. As long as trials are done fairly (critical!), not many people would have a good reason to give up their home and jobs and go on the run purely to avoid bringing a neighbor to a fair trial to account for accusations. And people going into hiding on a massive scale isn't even physically possible anyway.
let's not forget the international scandal of prosecuting thousands upon thousands of 'not-exactly-guilty' palestinians for not dragging their neighbors into court at gunpoint.
Just like in medieval Europe where it was used earlier, the letter of the law is strict. The enforcement of the law is softer.
The English didn't by any means go around imprisoning half their population or anything. In large part this was because it was effective at prevention. But also in large part, because the legal system had the latitude to pardon people if they could show good evidence that they really made a strong effort to create a preventative culture and to find the accused, etc. And they used that latitude often.
Just like when you go look up things like I dunno, 18th century British law, it looks like absolute dystopian hell where everybody gets murdered for everything "Cut a piece of somebody's clothing? CAPITAL OFFENSE!" etc. etc. Yet very very few people were executed compared to those actually convicted of capital offenses. The law was just like that to
allow such sentences when deemed necessary, not to
require them every time.
Usually, it was better for the nation and the community and everybody to issue a lighter sentence that would motivate better behavior, but not remove a valuable member of the workforce and population. Even truly despicable people were often spared and sent off to colonies instead, because it was better for the nation to get the fruits of their labor still and leave them alive than to just execute willy nilly.
It's a very judicially-oriented system, basically. Which is perfect here, because the judiciary isn't the most expensive or difficult part, and the judiciary is within U.N. nations' expertise. It's the boots on the ground rounding people up and the boots on the ground community activism and prevention that are the most difficult and expensive things, and it exports those most difficult duties onto the population.