Community policing has become a popular approach. Discussions of community policing have focused on urban and suburban departments, generally ignoring rural and small town police organizations. Ironically, many of these departments have a history of practices that correspond directly to the principles of community policing. For example, officers in these agencies typically know the citizens personally, have frequent face-to-face contact with them, and engage in a variety of problem-solving activities that fall outside of law enforcement. In neglecting small town and rural police, researchers have denied themselves an important natural laboratory for studying community policing.

This conceptual article focuses on the small-town municipal-level police department, as a distinctive model within the mosaic of US policing. As an example of the success of a low-tech, nonmilitarized, open systems model, the small-town police department stands in stark contrast to its urban counterpart. As a result of its affinity towards generalization as opposed to specialization, the small-town department has higher crime clearance rates and is organizationally receptive to the demands and requirements of community-oriented policing. The small-town police department's absence of``professionalism'' and militarism is key to its community connectedness, the foundation of its efficacy.

Community policing, crime mapping, and the recent attention to theories of social disorganization are all examples of the renewed appreciation for understanding the social and environmental context within which crime occurs. However, most studies of the ecological context of crime have focused on urban settings, with little research attention in less metropolitan areas. Despite a growing interest in rural crime, it remains an under-studied issue. The study reported here used a national county-level data set to consider whether variables commonly used to predict urban crime patterns can be applied similarly to more rural settings. The results showed that, although ecological and structural factors did a good job of predicting urban patterns of crime, they were less predictive of crime rates in more rural counties. Further, the constellation of variables that best predicted urban crime rates was not identical to the set that best predicted rural crime rates.

THE FUNDAMENTAL requirement for ethical treatment of research participants is that they give informed consent for their participation. Although there have been a few empirical studies of the consequences of informed consent (e.g., Singer, 1978), researchers need to know much more about the impact of this requirement on research results. This paper reports our findings regarding the consequences of obtaining written parental permission for research participation by minor students.Abstract The parents of an eligible sample of 1618 students in grades four through twelve were contacted to obtain written permission for their children to complete questionnaires related to alcohol and drugs. The distributions of students across the parental response categories (consent-denied, no-reply, or consent-granted) were compared on the student variables of sex, grade level, ethnic group, and reading and vocabulary test scores. The explicit consent procedure produced a sample that was approximately half the size of the eligible population and overrepresented white students while underrepresenting blacks and Asian Americans. There was no evidence of sample bias with respect to student gender, and the evidence regarding bias on academically related measures was mixed.