You look at the crimes and the punishment that Chizik is doling out, and there's no way a rational person can say he's soft on discipline.
The REC conspiracy comes into play with the fact that the local media has been dying to paint the program as inmates running the asylum. Complete free-for-all of anarchy. Even when the football players are victims of something as tragic as a shooting from an outside party, they desperately twist it to support the narrative of a program run amok. It's still certainly not as bad as it was at Bama right when Saban took over in 2007, which he handled by handing kids ice creams. But that doesn't fit the narrative.
That being said, at some point the arrests, no matter how petty the crimes may be, do actually start to become as embarrassing to the program as al.com desperately wishes it to be.