There apparently is a specific police to deal with religious offenses and such, and nobody dares cross them… not to be confused with the regular police apparatus that regulates real crimes and ensures there is no dissent about the government. Like any government, whether Saudis, Iran, N.Korea or the old USSR, this is not a rigid collection of ants following one dictators - there are factions, disputes, and tensions between them.
If you read about the revolution(s) in Egypt, there are multiple factions - the abysmal city poor, the backward uneducated religious rural folk, and the more moderate, western-exposed or -educated city folk, and the “middle” class and students who have been exposed to western thought and are less likely to feel doctrinaire about things. The revolution was driven by students and educated class fed up with repression and corruption (then hijacked by the Brotherhood and then the army.)
The same is true in Saudi Arabia population to some extent. The government tries to give everyone a job and a living wage, they even import foreign workers to do jobs the Saudis cannot or will not do (technical and menial jobs). But you have backward rural types, educated types, and a group of central authorities who could not be questioned.
A friend of mine described running into Saudi women who had gotten into the western compounds and were partying with the expats and Saudi men. At first, he did not realize they were Saudi because they were dressed western. He asked one, wouldn’t the police do something if they found them drinking and out unescorted? She said that she might be executed if her driver informed on her, but then one of her friends or relatives would kill him.
He also mentioned that if you dropped your wallet in the street you could return and pick it up the next day. Nobody would dare touch it because they were afraid if they were handling someone else’s wallet they would be arrested for theft.
He also mentioned that the standard operating procedure for the police was to arrest anyone the least remotely connected to the crime, then sort things out while the suspects sat in jail.
There was an exhibit of dinosaurs in a mall in SA a few years ago. Apparently the religious police have started stealing a page from fundamentalist US Christians, and challenging scientific evolution, so they shut it down. It resulted in insulting sarcastic tweets from various Saudis, along the lines of “the religious police don’t want to think there are other dinosaurs too”. The urban, educated types have cell phones, internet, twitter, etc.
When I was visiting Jordan, our driver stopped to help another driver for the same tour company who was having an argument with a Bedouin. The fellow had hit and killed a sheep, and the owner was demanding something like 2,000 Jordanian pounds (dollars?) about 10 times the going rate. We asked about the driver two days later, and he said it had already gone to the local court and the fee had been settled at the market rate. Maybe we need to learn a bit more about how justice works over there, when you consider the case of a 15-year-old who spent 3 years in Rikers Island because he stubbornly refused to plead guilty to something that he didn’t do… then charges were dropped. Compared to that, settling a case within a few days seems like a good idea.
As for charges - the religious police have no sense of humour or moderation. IIRC the last time someone tried charges of religious blasphemy in Canada was in Sault Ste Marie over the movie “Life of Brian” around 1980 and that was dropped very quickly. However, the Saudis take their religious laws very seriously, and like any bureaucracy, don’t want to admit afterwards what they did was a bad idea; if I had to guess, the religious court decreed the lashes, the regular courts have stepped in to say he’s not ready for the next round because they are a lot more moderate but can’t undo the other court. But any insult to Islam, any hint being told not to follow strict Islam are all serious offenses. It’s not surprising that a religious dictatorship is not as tolerant as a western democracy.
So like any society, it’s evolving. My guess is that when the change comes, it will be a palace revolt by the younger western-educated princes who will have a difficult time taking out the Wahabi religious police and it will be messy.