Most people comply voluntarily, freeing police to coerce minorities and criminals.

Evidence

H. L. A. Hart (1961, 201) argues that the Hobbesian vision of using coercion to motivate obedience to law or to the state depends on the background fact that most people comply willingly, perhaps for normative reasons. It is their compliance that makes it possible for the state to focus its limited resources for coercion on the potentially disobedient. This sounds like a fundamentally important claim. In fact, of course, for most of us most of the time in a benign society, the police generally work in our interest, and compliance is easily motivated. This fact leaves the police free, as Hart notes, to coerce selected others, including minority groups as well as suspected criminals. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 700

Categorization

• XREF: The voluntary-compliance base supporting coercive structures resonates with the doctor’s wife in Saramago’s novel, whose compliance with and policing of the blind community maintains a fragile order.
• CANDY: The counterintuitive fact that most citizens’ voluntary obedience is what enables police to focus coercion on minorities is a compact, conversation-worthy observation.