Call me crazy but I think the first part is very redundant. Those 3 questions are essentially asking the same thing. Not to mention they are too subjective in my opinion. Just cut it to one question. Maybe just ask whether the story is unusual. This allows you to remove repetitive posts about things like rape but leaves room for users to post weird stories that may he local but still enjoyed by the community every now and then.

My philosophy would be to give power to the users in upvoting what they want to talk about more so than the mods but also include the power for mods to remove things like daily rape crimes and crimes by immigrants which aren't interesting and would cause clutter.

Also I think the rules should be relaxed a bit somehow. I actually quite enjoy reading local news stories from time to time as well. This is a pan European sub but we need to remember that Europe is made up of a bunch of local communities as well. I'm struggling putting this into words exactly. Something like Europe is a thing as a whole but it is also the sum of it's parts. In this way, I think more wiggle room should be added to allow for things that arent blatantly pan European issues as well. I'm not sure how this would translate to making rules though.

Maybe work into the rule the specific issue we are trying to get rid of, which is to prevent a stream of local crimes to change public perception of refugees/immigrants and/or Neo nazis and making them look like some massive threat every time they throw a rock at a refugee center. I think this is the issue with 90% of the complaints about the local news rule and I think upvotes will solve the problem of other types of local news posted along with the fact that most other local news is usually boring and most Europeans are apathetic to it.

Just be honest about the fact that this discussion is because of immigration related stories being posted and not thefts of cheese type stories.