Well, your story proves that good incentives works well.
What happened? Well, fatalities went back down as the criminals learned that there was no point running.
The problem with Steem is that it rewards good content rather than good content that is hard to find which leads to rewarding those that were rewarded before since they are more likely to write worthy content rather than someone new who wrote only few things so far.
But the point was that those who tried to set up the system first got it wrong. They expected fatalities to drop when they no longer took pursuit. What they didn't realize was that they were inadvertently setting up an incentive to flee at high speed (the chance that the criminal would get away).
We must always keep our eyes open for those unintended consequences...