It happens today quite a lot actually. You only have so many police, courts, prisons and so on, so you have to focus your law enforcement resources on what matters more. If you dug into how the practice of policing actually works, especially in higher crime areas, you'd probably be fairly surprised. A lot of crimes do not have a consequence, because the police and prosecutors do triage.

Same thing happens with medical triage and prioritization.

The essential argument is: don't block a potential improvement because it doesn't perfectly fix the problem, and instead just stay in a worse situation. Because often, the practical reality is you only have imperfect solutions, and hypothetical perfect ones often do not happen. And you can still execute your perfect solution later after the imperfect one is complete.