There is a wealth of ingame rumours supporting the idea that the Bounty Hunters Guild is an organisation dedicated to killing people for money for the corporations. That is cold-blooded killing. Murder, if you like. It may not appeal to your contemporary liberal sensibilities, but all futures are dystopian, or should be, to be truly entertaining.
All criminals are hostile to the Guild; it has a foothold in every House; it offers missions on nearly every base; presumably information on criminal activity travels around. You shoot down a lane, you rob someone, you kill someone - it gets fed into the kind of database that presumably exists in the far distant future. As a result of your bushwhacking someone, someone comes to hunt and kill you.
"What about my rights?" you squeal.
"Eat plasma, creep," they say in response.
It sounds terrible, doesn't it? It sounds awful and frightening and like something made-up or from a computer game. Which it is. And it should be.
Now let's see where this fits into the game mechanics.
The player database is in thousands.
No one wants to play a game where you have to record every single activity by every single player on a forum - one's affiliation, experience and so forth are tied into your general reputation status, ID, and ship type.
What happens when they come for you depends on how you allow people to interact. Some people get arrested, but generally you get killed rather than captured. Killing someone else's character is regarded as metagaming, so we conveniently say "I escaped".
Personally, I'd like to delete a character when he gets killed, but I suck so badly at the fighting that I would never have a character who lasted longer than a week at most.