Temporal conflict and challenging the police

Abstract

This paper builds on research that shows that differences in the temporal properties of organisations can lead to temporal conflict, posing a barrier to collaboration. It considers how temporal diversity might shape political contention by examining how different temporal properties of New York and Toronto police and protesters manifest in their interactions. Vignettes of three protest events in Toronto and New York City in 2020–21 are constructed from fieldnotes, government planning and police oversight documents and media coverage. These illustrate how police and protesters understand protest events differently and how these collective actors strategically alter the temporal properties of their tactics (pace and duration) and their narratives (temporal orientation and temporal horizon) in order to gain leverage over their opponents. The temporal conflict that ensues varies in intensity, and shapes the sequence, emotional tone and outcome of these events. This shows how differences in temporal properties shape contention; how these properties can be used strategically to gain leverage and suggests that analyses of temporal conflict should be incorporated into research on contentious politics and studies of strategic interaction.

Introduction

There is a bitter and dark struggle around time and the use of time. This struggle has the most surprising repercussions (Lefebvre, 2013: 74).

The abolitionist Frederick Douglass (1857) said, ‘Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will’. Interactions between protesters seeking change and police defending the status quo draw on established tactical repertoires, but also involve strategic action. These strategies have temporal features, and these features are used by each side to gain leverage. This paper asks, how can we best incorporate a temporally sensitive understanding of the strategic way that protesters and police counter one another, within protest events? It answers this question by bringing together the literature on temporal diversity with discussions of strategic interaction in contentious politics and social movements and proposes an elaboration of Dan Ryan's (2008) concept of temporal conflict. While Ryan shows how the different temporal properties of organisations make it difficult to collaborate, this paper shows how these differences impact conflict, sometimes, in strategic ways.

The idea that time and space shape social interactions is not news to the readers of this journal. Nor is the idea that time is a dimension of power (Gokmenoglu, 2022). The dominant order incorporates a temporality or timescape, and powerholders maintain their authority in part through its reproduction (Gillan, 2008, 2020). This is done through calendars and clocks; norms governing speed, pace and rhythm; dominant narratives and conceptions of the past, present and future.

The dominant temporal order emerged out of struggles in early nineteenth-century Europe and birthed liberal democratic states, police and contemporary social movements. In his discussion of the emergence of the modern bureaucratic logic, Max Weber's (1978) description includes temporal values:

Precision, speed, unambiguity, knowledge of files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction and of material and personal costs — these are raised to the optimum point in the strictly bureaucratic administration. (p. 973)

Building on this idea, James C. Scott (1998) talks about how such values align with the logic of the modern state, seeking order through central control. Elisabeth Cohen (2018) also shows the political value of time and how the modern western state temporality embodies this logic. Within this dominant timescale, states, police organisations and social movements have their own distinctive temporal properties. Temporalities are embodied in and enacted by institutions and groups. The interactions of collective actors can involve temporal conflict as part of larger processes of social change, even if this remains implicit.

Confrontations between police and protesters are shaped by their distinct temporal properties. For example, the strategies of twenty-first-century North American police and protesters incorporate particular conceptions of the future and its relationship to the present. Policing agencies use a logic of intelligence-led policing, which drives them to identify and pre-empt threats to the present order. This logic infuses the repertoire of police operations, including crowd control, with a negative orientation toward the future, as they attempt to pre-empt potential worst-case scenarios. In recent years, a growing abolitionist movement in North America has celebrated more liberatory futures in its challenges to police powers and resources (Kelley, 2022; Maynard, 2018). The movement logic attempts to enact a world without prisons and policing, in and through its organising practices and tactics. When they interact, police and protesters express their distinctive temporal narratives and manage their tactics temporally, to gain leverage over and to constrain their opponents. How do we best understand these strategic interactions?

This paper suggests that an expanded version of Dan Ryan's (2008) conceptualisation of time conflicts is useful for understanding the street-level struggles between police and protesters. His analysis of community collaborations shows how actors with different temporal properties can face ‘time troubles’ when they attempt to work together. These troubles can lead potential collaborators to see each other as flawed or immoral. Time troubles become time conflicts when ‘mismatched organizational temporalities interact’ (Ryan, 2008: 142). This is likely when there are increasing numbers of collaborators and increasing diversity of temporal properties (151–155). This insight on how temporal diversity can shape interaction; how temporal conflict can lead to misrecognition and misattribution; and how conditions of interaction influence the level of tension can be applied to the context of conflict between protesters and police.

Most of the time, despite having different goals and temporal properties, protesters and police do collaborate in order to manage routine protest events. However, sometimes, their different goals will trump their willingness to collaborate, and conflict will become explicit. During more disruptive, unplanned and transgressive events, they compete for control over the sequence, pace and timing of actions and events, and for public support. These struggles for leverage are both symbolic performances and materially driven and include both learned repertoire and the strategic use of temporal properties.

To show how temporal conflict allows us to understand the sequence, tone and outcomes of contention, I review three highly visible, and disruptive protest events, one in New York City, USA, and two in Toronto, Canada from 2020 to 2021, showing how each side fights for leverage over their opponent through the temporal features of their narratives, and through the pace and duration of their tactics. These were events where there was active struggle between protesters and police. Police arrested activists at all three of these events and injured protesters at two. Two of these events led to subsequent investigations into police behaviour. The third prompted Op-eds and solidarity demonstrations. These are ‘eventful events’, with disproportionate impact on subsequent relations, identities and practices in each city (della Porta, 2008; Sewell, 1996). My vignettes of each of these draws on slightly different data. I analyse the May 2020 George Floyd protests in New York City using media coverage and reports by police oversight bodies; a July 2020 Black Lives Matter protest in Toronto using my fieldnotes from participant observation, bolstered by media and social media coverage; and for protests against the 2021 eviction of a homeless encampment in Toronto, I rely on my fieldnotes and municipal government documents obtained through Freedom of Information requests. These three vignettes illustrate how temporal conflict manifests between police and protesters. How temporal properties are strategically managed by protesters and police as they work to destabilise their opponent and in order to gain leverage. And how temporal conflict through different temporal properties used in struggle shapes the sequence, tone and outcomes of police-protester clashes.

Literature review

Temporal conflict is conflict that occurs between social entities with different temporal properties, through those temporal properties. These properties are enacted within ‘societies, situations, events and organizations’ (Ryan, 2008: 143). In addition to the property of the action, there is an evaluative component – the features of each property are conceived of as appropriate or inappropriate for a particular collective actor in a particular situation. Ryan (2008: 143) catalogues temporal properties as: the ‘rate at which events occur’ (pace, speed and tempo); pattern and recurrence (cycle and rhythm); the order of events (sequence); temporal size (duration); and ‘how far forward or backwards in time an entity’ considers relevant (time horizon) (2008: 142). Ryan's work also incorporates within a temporal property, the articulations and narratives about the meaning of that property. This paper will underscore the importance of this interpretive dimension, connecting it to the analysis of interactions between collective actors who are expressing their temporal properties. I add an additional property found in the data: time orientation. That is whether, when or how a collective actor directs attention to (or cues) the past, present or future. Examining the variation of these properties allows one to better understand how diverse temporalities and temporal properties are negotiated through interaction.

The literature on time conflicts emerged out of studies of coordination and collaboration. These show how temporal disorganisation and the difficulty in aligning schedules may result in stress (Southerton and Tomlinson, 2005; Wajcman, 2015). They illustrate that when a sense of urgency or pace differs among members, teams will find it hard to operate (Zhang, 2009). Mohammed et al.'s (2017) examination of restaurant kitchens found that a mix of ‘time-urgent’ and ‘time-patient’ team members caused conflict. Through the lens of organisational behaviour, temporal conflicts are ‘process conflicts’, concerned with how activities and interactions should proceed within a group (Jehn and Mannix, 2001: 239; Zhang, 2009). For example, members of groups may disagree on how long an activity should last, the sequence and pace of the activity and the meaning of these temporal properties (Zhang, 2009).

Looking at community-based coalitions, this work shows the difficulty arising from temporal diversity. Conceptions of the future also affect mobilisation, and differences or mismatches in these imaginaries create challenges to coordination and solidarity. There are different ways to understand and analyse such conceptions, including ‘projective grammars’ (Mische, 2009, 2014), ‘politics of anticipation’ that highlight imaginaries (Gokmenoglu, 2024), or ‘modes of future-making’ (Tavory and Eliasoph, 2013). However, as Tavory and Eliasoph (2013, 921) note, these discussions of coordination overemphasise the goal of acting together. I agree and suggest Ryan's articulation of the fraught connection between temporal diversity and collaboration offers a way to understand the temporal dimensions within struggles for power.

This builds on the approach of Pierre Bourdieu who shows how actors play with the time or tempo of action to gain leverage:

One can delay revenge so as to use a capital of provocations received or conflicts suspended, with its charge of potential revenge and conflict, as an instrument of power based on the capacity to take the initiative in reopening or suspending hostilities … Holding back or putting off, maintaining suspense or expectancy, or on the other hand, hurrying, hustling, surprising, stealing a march, not to mention the art of ostentatiously giving time (‘devoting one's time to someone’) or withholding it(no time to spare) (Bourdieu, 1990: 106–107).

Such techniques can be seen in contentious events, during which police and protesters struggle for leverage. These interactions may be strategic interventions or learned routines.

Collective actors have repertoires of action. Tilly (2008) shows how social movements use contentious performances like marches, rallies, civil disobedience and other tactics to balance competing goals of maintaining capacity, gaining support from outsiders and influencing authorities to achieve the desired change. Police have their own repertoires of tactics including barricades, weaponry and formations which they use strategically to achieve their own goals.

Over the last two decades, social movement scholars have moved from an emphasis on learned repertoire into a discussion of strategic action, and the choices faced by activists and their opponents (Duyvendak and Jasper, 2015; Jasper, 2004). Fligstein and McAdam's (2012: 47) work on strategic action fields shows how collective actors compete for strategic advantage in and through interaction with other groups. Considered together, these interactions become ‘conflict arenas composed of movement groups, state actors, the media, and countermovement groups, among others. Within an arena, actors can have more or less power, and gain a general sense of the ‘rules’ within that arena of ‘what tactics are possible, legitimate and interpretable’. With this knowledge, they choose strategies that attempt to gain leverage within that arena. Duyvendak and Jasper (2015) use the language of players and arenas to describe strategic interaction between protesters and police.

Duyvendak and Fillieule (2015: 311) show that the decision to use a particular tactic or narrative is shaped by internalised temporal conceptions, including understandings of past, present and future. This is sometimes strategic, as opponents justify their actions, but the ‘true’ goals of collective actors are rarely clear, and strategy is never simply about instrumental, rational choice. As Polletta and Kretschmer (2015: 47) remind us, ‘Activists are driven as much by identity as by interest, and as much by anger and resentment as by a cool calculation of costs and benefits. They are motivated by goals, but goals that are multiple, ambiguous and changing’. To understand social movements, as Wagner-Pacifici and Ruggero (2020), and (Gillan, 2008) point out, this means, one must pay attention to the diverse ways that activists embody and manage time. And I would add, we must locate these activists within struggle, in interaction with their opponents.

Because collaboration and conflict between formations with different temporal properties can occur, through those temporal properties, these lead to ‘unanticipated, but analysable, effects that emerge when mismatched organisational temporalities interact’ (Ryan, 2008: 142). Temporal conflicts can hinge on the meaning of moments, events and eras; on the timing, duration, pace, sequence and rhythm of actions; or on the features of temporal narratives, such as the appropriate temporal horizon and orientation. While Ryan is describing the way differences in these properties may not be anticipated to cause conflict; this paper will show how they can be used strategically by protesters and by police to disorient and confuse their opponent.

Police temporalities

The linear temporality of police is embedded in the history of the state and capitalism (Wood, 2014). Police emphasise the transcendent value of law and order through centralised and coordinated systems of control (Zerubavel, 1976). Influenced by a history of slave overseers, night watchmen and colonial militias, liberal democratic power holders encouraged the consolidation and regularisation of the police to legitimise and rationalise the capitalist status quo. As a centralised institution in a society where state power and rational forms of organisation were ascendant, police began to articulate a progressive conception of time to attract enough support from the wealthy to claim the ‘consent’ of the population. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, policing agencies influenced by this model worked to differentiate themselves from the military, explicitly emphasising their role as ‘serving and protecting’ public order, in the interests of a more rational and orderly society. As state actors, they worked closely with its rhythms. However, when police took on public order roles, they revealed their military heritage, with mass, uniformed formation, and colonial strategies of temporal and spatial control (Elliott-Cooper, 2021; Go, 2023).

The British policing model influenced urban policing around the world (Wood, 2014: 11). Although there were regional differences, until the neoliberal restructuring of the 1990s, professional policing models in Canada, the US and the UK were primarily reactive and prioritised defending the past and present order. However, with the embrace of intelligence-led policing, contemporary police organisations added an orientation towards the future, analysing past and present action to identify and pre-empt possible future threats. (Cope, 2004: 190; Ratcliffe, 2016). Contemporary police in both Canada and the United States now evaluate protesters as a threat to public order because they could disrupt business as usual. This approach defends a fixed present. When protesters are perceived to pose a credible threat to this status quo, police act strategically, intervene and justify the repressive tactics used to defend it.

Social movement temporalities

Like modern policing, contemporary social movements as a specific, organised political formations emerged through struggle with the democratising state, fuelled by capitalism and colonialism (Tilly, 2008). Social movement organisations used a repertoire of marching, rallying and petitioning in their campaigns, while displaying their worthiness, unity, numbers and commitment to the authorities they challenged. Often, they demanded rights and freedoms using the future-oriented language of the emerging cosmopolitan, enlightenment-oriented culture. These mobilizations led to gains around resources and rights but embedded social movements within the bureaucratic logic of the state, internalising elements of its linear temporality. Challengers (and their imaginaries) became more aligned with the rhythms of electoral politics, budget calendars and strategic planning. Their efforts to obtain reforms from authorities, incorporated an optimistic view of future improvement.

But throughout the history of social movements, persistent groupings of radicals have pushed back against these state-centred logics and temporalities, including some fighting to abolish slavery. Predating the modern state, the abolitionist movement was shaped by the temporalities of Afro-Caribbean culture and Christianity, with an emphasis on ethical, spiritual and moral practice prefigured in beloved communities (James, 1989). The movement called into question the promise of an ethical government in an imagined future and pushed against the dominant temporal order, explicitly valuing long-term, prefigurative efforts to build equitable, caring and healthy relationships (Maeckelbergh, 2016; Yates, 2014). Prefigurative movements expressing this future imaginary in present action have gained influence in recent years through the decolonial, global justice, occupy and queer mobilizations, existing alongside, and in tension with more reformist movements.

It is not easy for social movements to enact counter-hegemonic, non-linear temporal conceptions. However in autonomous spaces outside of public view they can mobilise and build capacity, establishing shared conceptions and properties and building their legitimacy. Even there, movements face challenges to building power posed by the temporal blindspots (Wagner-Pacifici and Ruggero, 2020) or temporal mismatches (Gokmenoglu, 2022), that make sustained collaboration difficult, in part through the ways that differential relationships to time can organise and perpetuate inequalities and tensions within a movement (Sharma, 2014a, 2014b, 2022). Conflict with those enforcing the dominant temporality constrains nascent efforts. This is made visible during protest events. For example, Sarah Sharma (2014a: 6) showed how the Occupy movement challenged the dominant temporality through their prefigurative protest tactics and stories but were vexed by the clocks and calendars of authorities that surrounded them. Indeed, in fast moving, face to face interactions of disruptive protest, expressions of counter-hegemonic temporal conceptions are often trumped by the pressure to react to powerful authorities and their calendars.

Temporal conflict in contentious events

Ryan's conceptualisation of temporal conflict shows how temporal properties shape both word and action, and how differences in these properties can cause tension, and these tensions have patterns. Tactics have temporal properties. A hunger strike is in its very nature about duration, whereas an arrest disrupts momentum. The influence any protest or policing tactic has on opponents depends on these properties, as well as its use and the context of that use. Protesters and police choose tactics in order to maintain or build their capacity, attract support, influence powerholders and contain their opposition. A single tactic can be used in different ways, including varying its pace and duration. For example, a protest march can move quickly or slowly. Police can surround protesters suddenly or gradually.

The narratives that protesters and authorities use also have temporal features. They may locate their struggle as part of a historical conflict, or as an unforeseen uprising. Both sides explain their actions and those of their opponents in ways that attempt to gain support from third parties, bystanders, and the media, leverage over their opponents, and influence on authorities. I will highlight two features in these vignettes: temporal orientation and temporal horizon. By temporal orientation, I mean the cueing of, or drawing attention to, the past, present or future (Kamila et al., 2022). The second feature is that of temporal horizon, marking how far in the past or future one must consider in order to understand a current event. These logic of and use of these temporal properties will shape subsequent reactions, interactions and outcomes of these contentious events.

To understand how activist and police temporalities shape their interactions, I will look at the tactics and narratives during three protest events that occurred in New York City and Toronto in 2020–2021.

Event 1 – May–June 2020 – New York City – George Floyd protests

In the summer of 2020, we witnessed Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murder George Floyd. The video of this killing drove a wave of protest against anti-Black police brutality. New Yorkers joined this international mobilisation, and there, like elsewhere, the protesters and police had quite different tactics and conceptions of the meaning of that moment. These differences mattered. Amongst other elements, the conflict hinged on both the meaning of this ‘historic event’ and its relationship to pasts, presents and futures and the temporal features of tactics being used.

Rooted in different temporalities, protesters and police managed the duration and pace of their tactics in ways that escalated tensions. Because the protests were a reaction to an external event, they were planned quickly. Many of the protest organisers were inexperienced, and not embedded in formal organisations (New York City Department of Investigation, 2020: 53). Indeed, many events were organised by individuals on social media, drawing on established repertoires of marching, blockading and rallying; and inspired by and sometimes replicating what was happening in other cities including the uprising unfolding in Minneapolis.

May 30th, 2020 was the third day of protest in New York City, and by this point, thousands had marched and shut down bridges and roads, and police had arrested hundreds of protesters. A few protesters had thrown a Molotov cocktail into an unoccupied police van. Protesters and police had been injured in street battles. The number of protesters and protests was continuing to grow.

In this context, the standard New York Police Department (NYPD) strategy for policing such events collapsed. Normally, the Strategic Resource Group (SRG), its specialised unit, uses intelligence-led policing to direct its efforts, relying on information on the group size, key members and the group's hierarchy (New York City Department of Investigation, 2020: 50). It uses past experiences, social media posts and other intelligence to evaluate the threat of disorder and to develop its response plan (Bolger and Speri, 2021). In the context of a reactive, continent-wide, popular uprising, such pre-emptive techniques fell far short. The NYPD could not rely on information from the past. Its bureaucratic processes did not work. Instead, the city's subsequent inquiry found that police defaulted to ‘disorder control’ in ways that escalated confrontation: ‘The N.Y.P.D. use of force and crowd control tactics often failed to discriminate between lawful, peaceful protesters and unlawful actors and contributed to the perception that officers were exercising force in some cases beyond what was necessary’ (New York City Department of Investigation, 2020: 3).

When the police tried to re-establish control through rapid containment, arrests and manoeuvres, protesters resisted, refused to cooperate or disperse and continued to march. Seething with frustration, the NYPD arrested hundreds, beating and pepper-spraying protesters, and, in at least one case, driving a vehicle into the crowd. The protesters chanted, ‘Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!’ and ‘Won’t Stop, Can’t Stop!’ as they extended the duration of their marches. They did so, not only to make claims to authorities about racist policing, but in order show their ability to disrupt police capacity, to show how they could prefiguratively, ‘keep each other safe’. When the police sped up their manoeuvres, the protesters slowed theirs. When the police demanded the protesters disperse, the protesters found new determination to keep going. Point, and counterpoint, each side altered their tactics through interaction.

The conflict was also shaped by differences in the way each side understood the meaning of the moment as a critical juncture (della Porta, 2020; Guardian, 2020). The perception that this was such a moment was, in part, due to the temporal disjuncture triggered by the CoVid pandemic (Cheung, 2020). New York City protesters saw themselves as witnesses an end to a long history of racist brutality. ‘I’m just really tired of sitting at home and just doing nothing, basically watching this happen’, said Jason Phillips, 27, of Queens, who attended one Manhattan protest. ‘I need to be a part of history. I need to be a part of the change’ (Sandoval, 2020).

In contrast, the protests led police to understand the moment as one where the city was on the brink of chaos. Police were pessimistic about the future. On 31 May 2020, then-NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea tweeted a message directly to the NYPD, calling the moment ‘unprecedented’ (Shea, 2020). He differentiated these protesters from those he saw as historically engaging in peaceful protest and civil disobedience, instead calling them ‘a mob bent solely on taking advantage of a moment in American history, to co-opt the cause of equality that we all must uphold, to intentionally inflict chaos, mayhem and injury just for the sake of doing so’ (Shea, 2020). While such a message cannot represent the entirety of the NYPD's interpretation of the moment or the movement, the statement does reveal the Commissioner's perspective. This story of an ‘unprecedented’ time, outside of planning and preparations, with a mob destroying the city, justified extraordinary measures and supported the use of militarised force to defend the ‘rule of law and this great city’ (Shea, 2020).

Police and protesters held different conceptions about this ‘unprecedented time’ and whether the future offered justice or mob rule. These conceptions reinforced a boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’, intensifying fear and incomprehension of the other. This ‘temporal mismatch’ between ‘different futurities’, increased conflict. As Ryan (2006) anticipated, such differences were often understood in terms of pathology or moral failure, fuelling escalation.

Event 2 – July 18, 2020 – Toronto – Black Lives Matter

A month later, the wave of protest had slowed and Black Lives Matter (BLM-TO) protesters in Toronto carefully managed the temporal properties of their tactics and narratives in ways that gave them leverage over the police. Unlike the other events discussed here, this one was planned and led by a single organisation in ways that allowed them to be more intentional about the temporal features of tactics and narratives. This protest began with a rally in front of a statue of Egerton Ryerson at the university named after him. Ryerson (1803–1882) had been influential in the development of Canada's genocidal Indian residential school system. After speeches were made, the activists poured paint on the statue and marched to the provincial legislative buildings known as Queen's Park, where BLM-TO members and supporters painted the statues of Canada's first prime minister, John A. Macdonald, and King Edward VII bright pink. Macdonald's plaque now read: ‘Defund, Disarm, Dismantle, Abolish’. CTV News quoted a BLM-TO press release explaining that the group had ‘artistically disrupted’ the statues in ‘support of demands to defund the police, invest in communities and create emergency safety services that do not harm Black and Indigenous people’ (Tsekouras and Aguilar, 2020). These demands were contemporary ones, directed at the City of Toronto.

This was civil disobedience, intentionally breaking the law to argue for a more expansive and substantive form of justice. Implicitly it requires an expansion of the temporal horizon, and an orientation that aligns past and present injustice. The tactic, used extensively in Black freedom struggles and elsewhere, anticipates enforcement of the law and uses that enforcement to highlight the ongoing injustice of the law and its enforcers. Civil disobedience poses a dilemma for the police. They must either enforce the law against protesters displaying their moral worthiness or they must allow highly visible lawbreaking.

The media coverage quoted BLM-TO cofounder Syrus Marcus Ware, who contrasted the injustice of the past and present with the possibility for a better future:

Much like the institution of the police, these statues are monuments that glorify the ugliest parts of our history and our present. If this society truly believes that Black lives matter, it's not enough to simply say so in words. Let's refuse to honour colonialism, anti-Blackness, and white supremacy. Let's tear down monuments to anti-Blackness and colonialism, including the police system. Let's build a society that truly values safety for all of us. (Tsekouras and Aguilar, 2020)

Ware used a temporal orientation that conflated past, present and future. This temporal narrative was a direct challenge to police and aligned with the chosen tactics.

BLM-TO activists heightened the drama by managing the temporal horizon and orientation of observers and participants, through both tactics and narrative. By linking their protest against police with the fight against slavery and colonialism, they placed the police in an awkward position, forcing them to repress activists positioned as freedom fighters, promoting a just and abolitionist future.

The Toronto Police Service (TPS) arrested three activists and used Twitter to direct the attention of observers to the present moment of lawbreaking. The police tweeted that they assisted the crowd in their peaceful protest. They emphasised the need to defend law and order and the right to protest. They explained that ‘a man and two women were seen vandalizing a statue at Ryerson University before going to one at Queen's Park’ (Draaisma, 2020). At a press conference, a police spokesperson argued, ‘The three arrests were made in accordance with the law and all rights were respected. There was nothing unique about these arrests or the process which followed’ (Draaisma, 2020).

The police explanation with its presentist orientation and shrunken horizon was immediately contested by BLM-TO tweets, which re-expanded the horizon and rhetorically aligned the police with historical purveyors of residential schools and slavery, linking protesters with the enslaved and imprisoned. The protest organisers then tweeted news that the protesters were being held without legal counsel and for an extended period. They demanded ‘free them all’ which gained urgency and intensity in this context, drawing hundreds of supporters to a rally outside the police station.

The TPS insisted that due process was being followed and that protesters were not released only because they refused to sign forms. The chief of police argued, ‘Some have chosen to perpetuate a false narrative about the access to counsel and the custody of these three individuals’ (reference). However, the activists’ claim intensified the moral drama, positioning the police as the most recent unjust oppressor in a long line of unjust oppressors and the protesters as imprisoned freedom fighters.

Early the next morning, the protesters were released to a large and jubilant crowd. BLM-TO had gained the upper hand in this temporal conflict, in part by managing the sequence, duration and timing of tactics and the temporal horizon and orientation of their narratives. Two years later, the statue of Ryerson is gone, and the university no longer bears his name. At Queen's Park, Macdonald's statue remains covered with plywood. Without paying attention to the way activists shaped and gained support for a narrative with a longer temporal horizon, one would not be able to understand how this event was so successful for the protesters and so confounding for the police.

Event 3 – June 22, 2021 – Toronto – Trinity Bellwoods Park encampment eviction

A year later, we can see how authorities can also be strategic about their use of the temporal features of their tactics and narratives in ways that maintain their leverage over protesters and residents, who held other imaginaries. Municipal government documents, fieldnotes, activist research and media coverage reveal how the temporal properties escalated the tensions between police, residents and supporters, and among different groups of residents and supporters. In the spring of 2021, the city began to challenge the homeless encampments that had grown in parks and ravines.

When the pandemic began in 2020, many people in Toronto refused to stay in homeless shelters, where infection rates were expected to be high. While there is a long history of ‘living rough’ in Toronto's ravines, camping in parks is forbidden. But, during the early stages of the pandemic, the city's reluctance to enforce anti-camping bylaws allowed encampments to grow and become a multivalent symbol. For some people, they were emblematic of the city government's failure to manage a housing crisis. For others, they were symbols of a struggle against colonial and capitalist logics, while still others saw them as smart efforts to stay safe in a hostile pandemic environment. Each of these positions had supporters who expressed these different temporal horizons and orientations.

Toronto's mayor, John Tory, told a story with a particular temporal orientation and horizon:

Since at least March 2020, there have been ongoing unlawful camping and disturbances at Trinity Bellwoods Park. An increase in the number and size of encampments have led to heightened concerns about the safety and wellbeing of people living outdoors, as well as the impact on the surrounding community (City of Toronto, 2021a).

Now, he said, the crisis would be ‘resolved’ (City of Toronto, 2021a).

As part of its efforts to challenge the legitimacy of the longer anti-colonial and anti-capitalist temporal horizon (long histories of dispossession) and the shorter present-orientation (the crisis is not over), the city issued press releases to outline its $2 million plan, which used the legitimacy of a highly bureaucratic, linear temporality to justify its intention to evict the ‘unlawful’ encampment and return to a prior ‘normal’ situation. Its ‘timeline of action’ for ‘encampment resolution’ was framed to emphasise the eviction as a rational effort for a more orderly future. A slide deck used by the City in the planning process read,

Utilizing the term ‘pilot’ to frame the approach to encampment resolution is beneficial for communication purposes and longevity of the solution being utilized. The semantics of the term allow the solution being tested to be framed as: 1. Innovative and novel … 2. Temporary … 3. Movement in a Productive Direction that… 4. Facilitates Intentional Lessons Learned (City of Toronto, 2021b).

Such language emphasised a progressive, rational temporal orientation toward the ‘operation’, one whose potential violence was made invisible.

The final version of the detailed operational plan emphasised the threat posed by various encampment residents and supporters, justifying heavy use of police and private security: ‘Senior City bureaucrats and high-ranking police officers jointly plotted complex and resource-intensive operations involving multiple divisions and hundreds of staff to remove a few dozen people from four ‘priority’ parks beginning in Spring 2021’ (Withers and Johnson Hatlem, 2022). It juxtaposed order and rationality with the ‘threat’ of encampment residents and their supporters. Chris Murray, the City Manager, explained what information the city provided to police:

The risk and threat assessments were informed by information shared regarding an increase of harassment and threats towards City staff, social media posts indicating an intent to obstruct the City's lawful enforcement of trespass notices, and the noted conduct experienced at [a previous eviction] Lamport Stadium on May 19. These are in addition to and amongst other factors that they [the police] take into consideration when developing operational plans. (Murray, 2021)

As discussed earlier, such threat assessments relied on an interpretation of past action as a threat to future law and order. These assessments hardened the temporal conceptions of their plan to ‘resolve’ the unusual situation through eviction. The city implied that the ‘state of exception’ created by the pandemic was over, arguing that law and order, bylaw enforcement and eviction offered a path forward to imagined safety.

In response to the City's narrative, encampment residents and supporters argued that, without real options, maintaining the encampments offered the best option for both safety and solidarity. In the months leading up to the eviction, these advocates gave deputations and presented arguments to the public about the need to support the residents of the encampments.

When this strategy appeared unsuccessful, the activists saw the timing and pace of the eviction as a target: something to be slowed, disrupted and used as leverage. When city workers and police delivered bylaw infraction notices for ‘trespassing’ to encampment residents who had lived, sometimes for many months, in the park, housing activists and residents developed their own defensive plan. Many residents wanted to resist the eviction, at least until they were assured appropriate housing. Some simply wanted to stay put. Susan Gibson, 65, argued, ‘I intend to stay here until I can get into permanent housing. I don't see any better option. There really is no better option [than public parks] until we can get affordable permanent housing’ (CBC, 2021). Supporters who had established trusting relations with the residents were determined to support their efforts by stopping or slowing the eviction.

Before dawn on June 22, 2021, the police and private security began to muster. Their speedy but orderly pace displayed the rationality of the eviction plan to the general public and the media. As media releases circulated, fences were steadily erected around the encampments. Meanwhile, social media alerts awoke dozens of encampment supporters (including myself). The city workers gave encampment residents 2 hours to pack up their belongings. While the city perceived this warning to be sufficient, the residents perceived the eviction as rushed. One resident, Xiao, ‘spent hours getting ready to leave the park – but it was not quick enough. She says she planned to “take back the tent and then all my belongings”, but the city “called the police [to] sweep us out of the park”’ (Withers and Johnson Hatlem, 2022). Behind the fences, tightly packed police units massed, and marched steadily into the encampment area. Although supporters tried to slow their progress, the police cleared the first cluster of encampments by midday. They were following a pre-determined schedule, as would later be revealed by the release of the city's plan.

The residents of the other cluster and their supporters continued to try to slow the eviction by altering the pace of their actions in subtle but perceptible ways. Police orders like ‘Move!’ were ignored, or only symbolically responded to through slow shuffling that served to ground the protesters more solidly. While the police demanded that residents pack, some simply reorganised their piles of gear. When the police said, ‘Leave this area now!’ more people joined the crowd. The effectiveness of slowing down as a form of resistance in contexts of limited power and a desire for anonymity has been identified in other contexts (Scott, 1998). When the crowd blocked police momentum, the horses arrived. Surrounded by fences, supporters linked arms to encircle the tents and the sacred fire being guarded by an Indigenous activist (Author's fieldnotes). When groups of supporters tried to pull down the fences, chanting ‘We keep each other safe’, the police rode horses quickly into the midst.

There were disagreements among those resisting the eviction about how long the resistance should last. Some residents and supporters saw the defence of the tents as a strategic effort — one which should continue until the encampment residents received and accepted offers of appropriate housing. Indeed, once some residents were offered permanent housing, some supporters asked other supporters to leave. Other residents and supporters saw the defence of the encampments as a lasting effort, defending people's ongoing right to use the space and countering the city's power to evict. In the end, these differences in the preferred duration of resistance created confusion, and police, using pepper spray, pushed the remaining supporters out of the park around 7 pm (Withers and Johnson Hatlem, 2022).

The municipal government and the police benefitted from the legitimacy of the dominant timescape; as they embraced a fast, coordinated and scheduled eviction. The protesters, in contrast, after trying to pre-empt the eviction, slowed its pace of exit as leverage in negotiations; but the legitimacy of police and the city and its timeline justified the use of overwhelming force to many in the public. But not all. The episode prompted widespread condemnation of the City's plan including a critique by the City's Ombudsman (Toronto Ombudsman, 2022).

The city and the police were painstaking in the use of the dominant temporal narrative. And, in the end, they did evict the residents, but not easily. The protesters resisted the eviction using their own temporal imaginaries of just futures, and ongoing crises. In this event, like the other examples, temporal conceptions, expressed in a narrative that justified the eviction as a move towards a safer future, constrained the efforts of protesters. The narrative allowed the city to paint the protesters as unreasonable, and ‘out of time’, resisting the shift away from the extraordinary times of CoVid. They used their promise of a rational, orderly future to gain leverage over the housing justice activists and encampment residents. They used temporal narratives strategically to gain power. However, they were unable to completely extinguish the counter-hegemonic effort. Three years later, scattered encampments remain in city parks.

The encampment eviction was a confrontation between at least two temporalities – one with state backing. Their differences made it difficult to share any understanding of the path forward. This is revealed in the sequence of events that unfolded, the moments of escalation, the emotional tone and the outcome of the confrontation.

Discussion

These three vignettes illustrate how the concept of temporal conflict reveals hidden aspects of struggle between police and protesters. Amidst other factors, conflict is shaped by the different temporal properties of police and protesters, through those temporal properties.

First, we see here how protesters and police draw on their distinctive temporalities to understand the meaning of events and to gain leverage over their opponents. They strategically manage the pace, duration and sequence of tactics; and the temporal orientation and horizon of the narratives that explain their actions (Duyvendak and Jasper, 2015). The mismatches that create arrhythmia can be used strategically by each side. In particular, one can see the ways temporal orientation is cued by actors in sophisticated ways. While collective actors choose tactics for multiple reasons, their inherent temporal properties and the way those properties can be managed are potent tools. When BLM Toronto expanded the temporal horizon in their justification of civil disobedience, they were able to mobilise bigger numbers. When the Toronto police moved quickly to evict encampment residents, they disorganised the protesters, who then tried to slow their efforts.

Second, differing temporal properties shape the emotional tone of contentious interactions. Differences in temporal conceptions make it harder for opponents to have a shared understanding. This is clearly the case in the unsettled disjunctural times of New York, after the killing of George Floyd, when violence escalated in part because both the police and protesters understood the meaning of the moment so differently. As Ryan points out, differences in temporal properties can lead collective actors to misunderstand and judge one another, accusing those with different temporal properties as having moral and ethical flaws. This makes escalation more likely. In New York, it led police to use violence and to criminalise protesters and ensured that protesters were terrified by seemingly unpredictable police actions. This fuelled anger and more militant action. Such misalignments are most likely in moments of uncertainty, where neither player has a clear plan, but is reacting to the actions and narratives of the other.

All this leads to the third observation, that differences in temporal properties shape the outcome of contentious events. Such differences make shared understanding and coming to agreement more difficult. It seems clear that the different temporal properties held by the New York Police Department and the protesters challenging them made it difficult to develop a shared understanding of the historical moment and the appropriate pace and duration of events: fuelling distrust and escalation. Similarly, the City of Toronto and BLM-TO or the encampment residents and supporters had difficulty agreeing about the relationship between past, present and future injustices; the appropriate timing and duration of events; leading to outcomes that were highly criticised. The differences in temporal properties that are tied to their distinctive timescapes made collaboration difficult, and conflict dramatic.

Conclusion

Scholars of temporality are not surprised by the idea that police and protesters have temporal properties. However, they may be less attuned to the way that collective actors use these properties strategically when they interact, as they compete for leverage and legitimacy. These contests occur within a particular context. The neoliberal timescape of twenty-first-century North America values speed, acceleration and control in the present and future. Police and other authorities vacuum up intelligence that help them to pre-empt threats to that system. They do so in ways that reinforce it, through an emphasis on linear progress, fixed calendars, and an orientation to the present. At the same time, counter-hegemonic social movements attempt to resist these tendencies and to enact liberatory and abolitionist futures in the present.

The concept of temporal conflict thus offers a temporally sensitive term to better understand the sequence, tone and outcome of interactions between protesters and police. Ryan's concept was developed to explain difficulties collaborating groups involved in community initiatives faced. He emphasises how temporal properties shape collaboration between likeminded groups, but it can usefully be extended and applied to more conflictual relationships. Police and protesters and their strategies embody distinctive temporal properties and the conflicts between them are, in part, temporal conflicts. Temporal conflict sensitises us to the ways that struggles over power, through power, are struggles over time, through time.

This contribution is intended to contribute to a dialogue launched by researchers including Gillan, Mische, Gokmenoglu, Wagner-Pacifici and Ruggero, and Tavory and Eliasoph who have established a serious conversation about how to understand the ways that temporal dynamics shape and are shaped by political struggle. I suggest that the concept of temporal conflict could be incorporated into research on strategic interaction within social movements, following the lead of Duyvendak and Fillieule (2015) which shows how temporal conceptions influence the decision to use a particular tactic or narrative. It could also benefit research on temporal diversity and time studies by highlighting the strategic dimensions of temporal diversity and the ways that arrythmia between opponents has emotional and political consequences. Understanding the temporal dimensions of strategic conflict is not simply a scholarly endeavour. It is one with real and political implications. If we can better understand how temporal properties of protester and police strategy influence the sequence, tone and outcomes of contention, we will have something valuable for the players themselves. More research is clearly needed. But for now, let us acknowledge that the interactions between protesters and police are neither solely rational calculations of cost and benefit, nor enactments of learned scripts. As the examples here show, the conflicts between police and protesters are both strategic and emotional; they are embedded and volatile; and they involve temporally variable narratives and tactics. They are about power and change in the multi-dimensional medium of time.