I have to admit i had a police tag on my indy miner ship . And i have done almost everything to lower my reps with Police and it worked......
However then i got an kusari naval forces tag with my img id the dropping kusari rep i got gateway tag followed by navy tag ,lsf tag and so further
Shooting npc's is not a solution because it also lowers your targeted faction id rep wich you have to fix by doing a mission.... and that results to yes a police tag
i got sick of trying and abandoned the char to start all over
You see the problem is new players start making money by doing some missions and when they finally have enough money to start trading the damage is done and is impossible to fix
(it has nothing to do with lazyness)
so id say leave them alone as long as they are lawfull traders, The most of them worked hard to get the char a little funding so starting over will be a pain again (missing your mapped routes)