Self policing has good and bad.
Good is that they know the operation and what the dangers really are.
Bad in that people with no qualifications often get out in positions to make the decisions. Shortly after the BTMRR incident at Disneyland, I e-stopped a ride in Epcot because it lost show items that per the SOP it needed to be shut down and fixed.
The manager on duty was furious because I didn't call to ask for permission (other rides were down) and it was supposedly his decision. I had to try to calmly explain we shut down for safety reasons when a projector goes out because while it is a show quality issue we also don't know if the projector has blown up and someone needs to go and check. We're taking large scale projections, not small elements of larger scenes.
He threatened to write me up, but since the SOP agreed with me I was safe. A few weeks later the SOP books were removed from the operations consoles. The best truthful explanation I could suss out was that upon complaining about the SOP shutting the ride down "for no reason" the issue was brought to the powers that be and they quickly realized the SOP was a liability of management chose to override what tnsaid and subsequently injured or killed someone.
Not following your own policies as printed in an obvious book would be pretty damning. So, in their minds the SOPs had to go. (Not to emphasize following them... god forbid.)
A few months passed and I'm opening an attraction and hear breaking glass, twisting and scraping metal, and other unhappy sounds during a test cycle. I don't call for authorization, and immediately e-stop the ride. Policy at the time was that any foreign sound was grounds for an e-stop because of the BTMRR incident.
Same manager finds out and barges in ready to chew me out, as I've now delayed the ride opening and again other attractions are having "real technical issues."
The techs inform him the hydraulic system that controls the show doors had a catastrophic failure, the basement was flooding with hydraulic fluid as we spoke, and the show door had risen at an angle that caused damage to booth the door and structural wall of the building. If I hadn't stopped it, the entire wall might have collapsed.
He just glared at me.
And ever since I don't let other people make safety decisions for me, not even the ones entrusted with the power to do so by some bogus legal mumbo-jumbo.