The quality of police service is a function of the organization's capacity to effectively collect, collate, analyze and disseminate relevant data. Our understanding about the general state of police crime analysis in the USA is limited. We have some data from the LEMAS survey and a good deal of anecdotal information about crime analysis operations. To date, researchers have not engaged in systematic, rigorous efforts to develop a comprehensive sense of various administrative, technological, and operational aspects of the police crime analysis function. In this study, a census of police departments with over 100 sworn personnel was administered (summer 2000). Findings of that survey are reported here.

Much has been written about policing in America. We know a good deal about its structure and function, operations, culture, etc. Based on this wealth of knowledge, we have drawn conclusions about the causes of observed dysfunctions in the institutional arrangements of policing. This has led, from time to time, to a variety of police reform efforts, the most recent of which is the furor over community policing. Some have argued that police policy has been driven by research conducted for and in urban American police departments and that the portability of those policies to rural American police departments may be inappropriate. This paper seeks to explore the urban/rural divide by comparing the attitudes of police officers from a large urban American police department with those of police officers from five small town rural American police departments. Significant differences in the attitudes between the urban and rural American police officers are found and the implications, pursuant to the limited generalizability of these findings, are examined.

This study examines the role that disorder and neighborhood physical condition play in explaining the variance in crime, controlling for theoretically relevant neighborhood socioeconomic conditions. Three hundred forty-nine blocks were randomly selected from two police precincts in Mobile, Alabama. Violent crime, property crime, and disorder were measured by block from police department data. An environmental survey was conducted by block to determine various physical characteristics that are believed to attract or repel predatory criminals. Violent crime and property crime were regressed on disorder, physical condition, and several socioeconomic variables. Models were constructed to explore the interaction between disorder and physical condition. The findings reveal an interaction between disorder and physical condition that are significantly related to crime, controlling for socioeconomic variables. Implications of the findings are discussed with respect to the “broken windows” controversy and practical police tactical operations.

Community-policing approaches police change from two dimensions, one administrative and the other political. The administrative aspects of community policing address structural and managerial issues, for example, decentralization, participatory management, and so on. The political dimension is somewhat less straightforward because it seeks to address the conditions of bureaucracy that conflict with democratic principles. In this article, the author proposes to explore the notion of representative bureaucracy as it applies to policing. Specifically, the author investigates the degree to which the beliefs of the police mirror their constituency (belief congruence) in a mid-sized Southeastern city. Implications about belief congruence derived from previous research are in part confirmed and in part rejected by these findings.