First, a human population living in a particular, defined geographic space (e.g. a national space, a region, a city, or a neighborhood) is, in the absence of a more extensive set of processes constituting defined institutional linkages between individuals, just a population. That is to say, the mere existence of a human population is not a community. Community is an outcome of an extensive process, identifying and/or producing sources of a connection between individuals and, importantly, putting in place the institutional mechanisms that will define the temporal duration in which these connections will be operative. If there are obvious, preexisting sources of connection between individuals that can be easily identified and utilized to define the contours of a community, then the sorts of institutional bonds needed to establish and prolong the existence of community may be minimal. If, on the other hand, there are few obvious linkages between individuals, then the necessary institutional mechanisms required to produce community become more extensive and, possibly, more daunting.
To the extent that the population of the United States can be called a community, it is a community in which individuals share a range of bonding institutions. Principally, there is a long collective history, predating the foundation of the US government or, even, the American Revolution, outlining the collective fiction that individuals living today share a common experience with people living two to three hundred years ago. I label this a fiction for numerous reasons. Notably, it is wholly subjective - every individual living in the United States has a different conception of what our shared history amounts to, and, for all the complaints that patriotic Americans like to issue that we aren't doing enough to instruct American youth about their collective history, particular individual/subjective visions of history constitute partisan arguments to enforce particular ideas of what we are all supposed to learn from history and how that is supposed to change our behavior in the present. For large numbers of Americans who take pride in the history of the US Constitution and the individual freedoms it codifies against state oppression, it is easy to forget that the same document counted a large segment of individuals in the US population as equivalent to three-fifths of a human being. There is an abundant range of material in two to three hundred years of history in Anglo-America to sew together in order to establish a fictive account explaining the singular unity of an American community, discounting any connection established by Constitutional factors.
The critical point with history is that its use to establish community always constitutes an individual/subjective act. No two individuals can ever establish a connection between each other based on a subjective (fictional) bond of history in precisely the same terms because no two individuals can ever weave together precisely the same history in their minds. In addition, however individual/subjective history is as an institutional bond of community, it does constitute a form of work. It takes time to learn for an individual to develop a conception of history, and the more time an individual takes to learn history, the more likely it is that they will become exposed to ideas in historical research that contradict those they have already incorporated and, thus, to develop a more nuanced conception of history. An American for whom historical research amounts to spending an afternoon watching John Wayne movies will have a less nuanced view of American history than someone else who, in addition to watching old Westerns and war movies, opens up books about native American culture and relations with Anglo-America and about the social history of American involvement in, say, the Second World War, including themes of racism and global politics. Some individuals who expend extensive amounts of time researching history intentionally limit their sources to exclude sources that contradict their views on history. Others are committed to listening to alternative interpretations, however much these make their blood boil. Such differences imply that any connections between individuals based on a "shared" history may be only skin-deep.
Conversely, as a national community, Americans share a much more thorough collective bonding institution: we are citizens under the institutions of collective governance established and founded on the US Constitution of 1787. If the bonding institution of history requires work, then the bonding institutions of collective governance require a lot more work, and that work is collective in nature. Citizenship requires performance of a list of individual duties to be performed at the behest of the state (i.e. the collective assembly of citizens), and the shorter the list of these duties the less robust citizenship will be as a bonding institution establishing community. In some national communities, citizenship requires, for example, that each individual undertake a period of collective service, often under arms and under military discipline. In other national communities, the sole mandatory collective burden of citizenship is payment of taxes as a portion of total income/earnings. The critical advantage of citizenship, relative to history, is that, as a bonding institution, it both mandates collective work and it is universally identifiable and definable across individuals. Individuals can always identify and point to their own rights and responsibilities relative to the constitutional framework of their community. Citizenship is objective/inter-subjective in its own terms. Provided the constitutional framework of community mandates an equality between individuals, the rights and responsibilities conferred on each individual as a citizen is the same, and that sameness provides a foundation to the unity of individuals across the spatial contours of the community.
Communities, however large or small, therefore, always involve some quantity of work invested by individuals as the price of bonding together with other individuals. A family, to the extent that it is considered a form of community, involves work from all the members of the family to solidify the bonds of the community. That work might involve some earning of incomes from labor market activity outside of the family, and it also involves emotional work to deepen in empathy and tenderness, especially between marital partners, however the partners initially came together. Beyond these institutions of familial community, there are legal rights and responsibilities attendant to legal marital unions, especially with respect to the care and nurturing of children. In an objective/inter-subjective sense, these standards define the legal contours of familial community in particular broader public communities (i.e. under the constitutional institutions of an American state government).
Considered in these terms, all individuals, at any given moment in time, belong to multiple distinct communities, each with their own alignment of bonding institutions conferring rights, responsibilities, and duties on the individual and each involving diverse assemblages of other individuals. Each of the communities to which an individual belongs places a particular burden on the individual to undertake necessary work to strengthen the bonds of the community, sometimes to the benefit of one community at the expense of another. Likewise, each of the communities maintains a diverse range of institutional bonding mechanisms to compel the individual to prioritize one community over other communities. For instance, communities structured by particular legal/constitutional mechanisms may exert a particularly strong influence on the actions of individuals. Similarly, to the extent that we regard workplaces as particular manifestations of community, structured, in this regard, by the spatial, temporal, and legal boundaries of a particular workplace (e.g. a firm) and by the institutions that bring individuals together into the community (i.e. a labor market or a set of distinct labor markets), the forces of economic compulsion (i.e. the need to earn an income to support basic consumption needs) exert a noteworthy level of pressure on individuals to support the integrity of the community. If workers in a firm do not embark on their defined roles in the firm with a sufficient level of discipline and care in maintaining the quality of their work, then either they will lose their job, individually, or the firm will, collectively, fail, undermining the generation of incomes for the totality of the workplace.
Moving forward from the insight that communities all require on-going work to define, develop, and reinforce the institutional bonds of the community, it is, in certain respects, disingenuous to throw the term "community" around to describe particular segments of a population that nominally share some particular set of characteristics (e.g. the African-American community, the community of residents in a particular neighborhood in a particular city) without a clear delineation of the institutions constituting such communities and working to ensure their continuity and integrity over time. Such communities need to be constituted by some level of community/institutional work by the individuals that constitute the communities as they are so identified, whether that work is undertaken individually by each individual in the community (e.g. learning about the terms of a "shared" history) or collectively through joint bonding activities. I will label the time required to do the work to enforce the integrity of the community as community time.
To the extent that all individuals are involved in multiple forms of community and most of the things that individuals do work to reinforce their bonds to one or another of their communities, almost all time in the lives of human beings can be characterized as community time. However, we need to further differentiate between particular forms of community time. If time in the workplace is a particular type of community time, it is time spent enforcing the integrity of a community established in relation to labor markets for the purpose of earning income. Market-oriented paid labor time is, in these terms, a different manifestation of community time than, say, the unpaid labor time that takes place within households ensuring the internal integrity of a family unit. The economic compulsion of subsistence transforms the particular nature of a community undermining the degree of freedom with which individuals enter into community. In this respect, I want to partially exclude consideration of market-oriented paid labor time from the broader conception of community time. Likewise, I want to at least partially exclude the labor time expended by individuals in their households to enforce the institutional bonds of family, because these similarly involve a certain level of personal, psychological, and economic compulsion that undermines the level of freedom exercised by individuals in community. I will label this form as family time.
In the lives of individuals, the remnants in the expenditures of time beyond market-oriented paid labor and family life might, in some way, be characterized as a kind of personal time. It is this residual that remains to be divided between a range of activities fulfilling to the lives of individuals, including chilling out and watching movies, reading major and compelling pieces of literature, listening to music, carrying out home improvement projects, and having a drink at the pub with friends. Any or all such activities are likely to be important to the psychological existence of an individual and their capacity to depart from personal time and face the distinct burdens of family time and market-oriented paid labor time. In a certain sense, a distinction between personal time and family time might be difficult to articulate, because individuals might ascribe a high value on time spent with members of their household to their own personal wellbeing. On the other hand, the bigger distinction that we might articulate here is between personal time and community time writ large, at least with regard to the primary motivations underlying each. In certain respects, individuals may ascribe a high value to the time spent with others and may find the meaning of their existence through communal engagement, whether that engagement occurs strictly through paid employment or during happy hour at the bar. However, it is at least as likely that an individual views the hours spent in communal activities and those that can be spent alone meeting other personal needs in exclusion as mutually exclusive and competing imperatives. Personal and community time are, in these terms, substitutes in the expenditure of time. The more time that we have to spend with others achieving some collective task means that we have less time to be alone achieving other things that are important to us.
By our conventional practice of measuring the length of the day by the rotation of the planet, every individual has twenty-four hours to divide between market-oriented paid labor time, family time, personal time, and other, non-compelled/discretionary manifestations of community time. We might regard the time that people spend sleeping as a kind of personal time, and it certainly is important and sadly uncommon for everyone to get an adequate quantity of sleep, but calling sleep an activity of personal time largely devalues the distinction that I am trying to make here. For our purposes, if we deduct seven hours per day for sleep, probably the bare margin of what people should regularly be expected to enjoy in order to function, then we all divide seventeen hours each day between the various categories of waking hours. Consider in more broadly social terms, the choices that each individual makes contribute in the aggregate to the amounts of market-oriented paid labor time, family time, personal time, and discretionary community time expended across a larger population. To the extent that the last of these categories is extremely important to the articulation of community and to the sense of connection between otherwise isolated and unconnected individuals, say, as fellow citizens and residents of particular place, the more time that individuals spend earning income or negotiating family problems in isolation within the household mean that they have less time to develop and nurture community and to solve basic collective problems manifest at the level of community.
The problematic of inadequate discretionary community time across a wider population manifests itself in two distinct forms. First, there may be a disproportionality in the expenditure of discretionary community time between groups of individuals. Some people have lots of time to spend crafting the culture and institutions of community that characterize their everyday lives and the places in which they live, while others either do not have any discretionary time to spend or choose to spend their discretionary time doing things unrelated to community. Second, in the aggregate, the demands of non-discretionary community time may be sufficient to deny an entire population of discretionary community time. If everyone within a population is consumed with the need to earning income and to tend to household matters, then inadequate quantities of time remain across the population to deal with needs across the broader population.
The easiest way to deal with these problems is to substitute discretionary community time for specific forms of market-oriented labor time. That is to say, if a population doesn't have time to tend to its collective needs through community work, then we establish forms of market-oriented paid labor in the public sector (i.e. government) and start paying people to do the things that populations don't have time to involve themselves with. Maybe a particular local population could deal with the problem of ensuring that trash gets removed from personal residences and taken to a central disposal point by organizing groups of residents who would voluntarily take the time to take their neighbors' trash to the dump, but it is easier to just make this into a form of paid work, either by a department of government or by a private firm, contracted by the government or by individual households. More broadly, democratic governance of a population has, in earlier periods of American history, especially in New England, involved institutions where assembled populations came together to make collective decisions on the governance of the community, a community expressly enunciated by the act of coming together as an assembled population (i.e. town meeting). Over time, such practices have fallen out of favor because people just do not want to spend the time to come together and negotiate the minutiae of local governance. Instead, in most places, an elected mayor and city council deal with these details in exchange for salaries paid from tax revenues. Invariably, the communal expense of voting time and the expense of taxation/paid government employment appears less onerous to most people than the need to spend a day at town meeting four times a year and to organize voluntary crews of residents to achieve trash removal. Paid public bureaucracies always substitute for the unpaid community work of citizens, always with the sacrifice of an institutional opportunity for community building in exchange for a certain quantity of taxes from the general population. They extend a broader social division of paid labor time to a range of tasks intended to benefit the broader population without compelling the broader population to voluntarily participate in any palpable way.
Taking a step back at this point, a population substitutes market-oriented paid labor time for discretionary community labor time for one of two reasons: because, as a whole, the population doesn't have enough discretionary time to engage in its collective needs, or because there is a disproportionality in the availability of time to deal with collective needs across the population. In the latter case, a particular subset of the population has the time available to craft the institutions of the community in its own interests. As such, this subset of the population has the time to participate and the ability to shape governance in ways that perpetuate its influence over the broader community over time. The less time that certain groups need to spend on market-oriented paid labor to meet their individual needs, for example, the more time that they have to contribute influence over the organization of government that will benefit their interests. Considered in these terms, certain segments of the population are more invested in the outcomes of governmental processes and, beyond the particularities of government, hold a stronger sense of community relative to the remainder of the population based simply on the connections they forge among themselves through their actions. For the remainder of the population, community might appear as an abstraction or a slogan divorced from their life experiences, but, for this limited ruling strata of the population, community is the outcome of their engagement.
Differences in amount of discretionary community time available to individuals, further, structures conflict between mutually exclusive groupings of individuals with different degrees of connectivity to institutions conferring political power. If the ruling strata constitutes a particular form of community through its allocations of discretionary community time, then oppositional groups constitute alternative forms of community, and this, in turn, articulates the terms of inter-group conflict between alternative manifestations of community. In these terms, a population may be characterized by conflict between multiple, discrete, and divergent communities and by the social isolation or peripheral connection of the larger population to one or more such conflicting communities.
To consider the range of activities and institutions involved in the maintenance and governance of local populations, policing involves the deployment of particular groups within the population to maintain the integrity of private property, public safety, and prevention/cessation of prohibited activities. There are, of course, different ways that we could envision how such activities might be exercised by a population, some of which might enhance the democratization of a community, relying on contributions of discretionary community time by individual residents/citizens to ensure that the commonwealth of the larger population might be protected against threats from within and without, the wellbeing of residents assured against reckless actions by certain individuals, and the peace maintained against disruptive behavior. In general, the more participatory and democratic the determination of broader standards of behavior across the population and the more participatory and democratic the enforcement of such standards, the less likely a confrontational dynamic will develop in the process of policing. Conversely, a confrontational dynamic is more likely to develop the smaller the segment of the population is involved in general governance and enforcement of standards. When people don't have time to participate in their own governance, government becomes an alien force hovering over their lives and inflicting discipline under standards not of their choice or their consent. Similarly, officers enforcing such standards become the face of tyranny in the lives of people who feel wholly disconnected from the institutional mechanisms of power, whether the latter have organized themselves as oppositional communities or simply exist as isolated individuals.
When we extend the social division of paid labor to policing, we create professional/bureaucratic police departments. There is nothing necessary about the existence of paid police bureaucracies, as opposed to policing through voluntarily organized groups within a population. However, as with every other public function that is subjected to the social division of paid labor, the bureaucratization of policing resolves inadequacies of discretionary community time and disproportionalities in discretionary community time. The problem here, as in every other circumstance where aspects of collective governance occur with disproportionalities of discretionary community time and the formation of multiple, mutually exclusive community groupings across the population, arises when the standards developed to manage paid bureaucratic policing reflect explicit direction from a separable and distinct ruling strata.
Invariably, when one particular grouping within a population enjoys a disproportional influence in the determination of policing policies, especially influencing which groupings in the population should receive extra attention from police officers for purposes of preventing restricted activities, the police bureaucracy effectively becomes an arm for the will of the ruling strata against oppositional communities. When the ruling strata embodies certain associational characteristics, including with regard to household wealth but also with regard to race, policing policies may, thus, embody the particular apparent needs of wealthy individuals of a particular race, whether or not the characteristics of the paid police bureaucracy mirror those of the ruling strata or not. In this sense, if you train and indoctrinate paid police officers to enforce a particular legal code through particular means largely developed by a wealthy, White ruling strata, then it makes little difference whether the overwhelming income and racial background characteristics of the police force are less wealthy and non-White.
Paid professional bureaucracies are designed to function transparently in accordance with defined rules. A failure of individuals to faithfully exercise their duties in accordance with such rules (i.e. a "bad apple") should be easy to identify and rectify. On the other hand, when a broader compliance with established rules by a paid bureaucracy generates dysfunctional outcomes across the larger population, it may reflect the existence of a larger problem in conflict between groups. For example, if a municipal government establishes a paid bureaucracy to remove trash from the residences in the municipality but establishes procedures that guarantee that certain residences will be permanently excluded from use of the service even though individuals at such residences pay taxes for their use, then problems with disproportionalities in trash removal would be explicitly linked to the procedures established by the government, in the interest of policy makers. It would not be a problem of "bad apple" trashmen but a systemic problem based on the rules under which the trash removal service are compelled to undertake their duties. Fundamentally, however bureaucracies are established, they always ideally operate at the behest of their overarching partisan political authorities, to whatever extent a connection between the unique interests of the ruling strata and the rules governing bureaucracies can be explicitly articulated.
Summarizing the insights that I am attempting to convey in this post, policing, as a process oriented to securing the integrity and safety of a particular population, reflects the interests articulated within particular communities contained by the population. These communities are not axiomatically identical to the broader population. They are the outcome of the creation and utilization of diverse bonding institutions. However, in every case, the development of communities involves an expenditure of labor time by individuals, and the capacity of individuals to expend time to forge connections with other individuals is disproportional across a population. Likewise, populations may be characterized by multiple poles in the development of discrete and divergent communities with divergent levels of connection to institutions of collective governance, including policing. The bureaucratization of policing, further, reflects a decision by particular influential communities to substitute market-oriented paid labor time for voluntarily discretionary community labor time of members of the population. The basic substitution of market-oriented paid labor time for discretionary community labor time has consequences both for the process of community development and for the interests served by established bureaucracy. In a larger sense, the basic problems that I am trying to isolate in this argument concern the ways in which people use time, the extent to which disproportionalities in discretionary time translate into divergences in political power, and the ways in which political interests of discrete communities get entrenched through rule making in the extension of market-oriented divisions of labor to public processes.
In the present context shaped by a long history of unarmed Black Americans being killed by police officers, I think that it is important to remember that we are dealing with the governance of a public process to which we have extended the social division of market-oriented paid labor under particular rules and standards established at the behest of particular communities. There are a lot of dimensions structuring the broader problem here, not all of which have been adequately addressed in this document. I have largely ignored the particularities of race, racism, and racialism in the American context, for example. My issue resides in the economics of time and the ways in which individual expenditures of time shape the communities with which we identify. Importantly, I think community and an impoverishment of connection to community within particular populations in the United States and across our larger population is a significant problem, and that problem proliferates when we substitute market-oriented processes for processes grounded in voluntary discretionary community-building. Critically, there are numerous ways that you can organize the policing of populations, and the particular ways that we have developed to undertake policing have had consequences, promoting or otherwise sustaining inter-group (racial) conflict, diminishing alternative, more encompassing conceptions of community, obscuring and obfuscating the relationship of (racially and economically constituted) ruling strata to the development of standards governing police bureaucracies, and, more generally, devaluing the formative effects of more democratic engagement in local governance. In these terms, it is worthwhile to consider the systemic problems with policing in the United States, but I don't think that we will adequately come to a solution to these problems unless we also address broader problems with the development of community and, critically, the formation of community involves the use of time by individuals.
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