Rule clarification

[[TC]»Elmo«]

To be clear noone, and I mean noone, should be using force before the 45s mark. There is no reason whatsoever to do so. As you said, the rules are perfectly clear on that and there is no leeway.
If admins have been recently saying different, then we'll need to give a reminder.

The old rule was: "Make sure the suspect knows he is being pursued before making any physical contact."
That was very imprecise, far from ideal and was causing some problems from people claiming they didn't know they were being chased, or people knowing they were being chased but unable to pull over safely before the cop used force.
The rule was changed to its current form alongside the message from the InSim to solve those problems.
The 45s mark both confirms to the suspect with a message that they're being chased and is a reasonable amount of time for the suspect to pull over from any part of the track. It's also not too long for the cop to wait if the suspect is clearly not stopping and is causing danger to other drivers.

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Over-fining:
It is literally impossible to grossly over-fine someone now, because the InSim won't let you fine an amount above what is permitted for a particular offence.
It never used to be enforced by the InSim and bad cops often tried to fine too much (eg €1000) for a minor offence.
The strong warning was removed when the list of clickable fines was added to the InSim, because that particular problem was instantly removed.

Now, I'm sure there are a few cops who choose a high fine more than they should, but at least it can't be a huge overfine anymore.
What I would like to see is some stats recorded to show what proportion of each fine level (low/med/high) that each cop is fining. That way we could pretty easily find the persistent offenders and do something about it - at the moment there's no reliable way of knowing whether a cop is generally fining correctly or not.

I guess it would be nice to have a short message on the fine list regarding what is considered to be worth a low/med/high fine. However, writing such a message to be succinct would be quite tricky - you're welcome to have a go