Looking at the scanForOffenders command I just noticed that the chance to find an offender raises with governement type. It starts with zero chance in anarchies: gov_factor becomes zero and than legal_factor is zero.
This is intentional and not a bug, but scripters should know. Police can't find offenders with this command in this government type. The populator does not add police in ananchies so no real problem. However it does add hunters instead. In anarchies, hunters (and police) can only react on a direct dristress call or clean hit.
When the wiki is on-line again Ill add this info to the command. e.g. the random hits bar or the sentinal station are only added in anarchy systems and use this command. By definition they never will find anything with this scan.
But we already knew we had little to expect from the police in anarchies.
Well it sort a makes sense, in an anarchy there would be no police, however
it´s kind a sad that NPC hunters, only can react to distress calls and not go on the prowl on their own...
That said, its easy to write an AI that looks for Pirate and a script that checks its bounty..