Community policing in small town rural America: A comparison of police officer attitudes in Chicago and Baldwin county, Alabama

Abstract

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.

Women and Crime in Context

“…Interest in rural crime has increased recently, with studies focusing on drug use (see Diala, Muntaner, & Walrath, 2004;Donnermeyer, Barclay, & Jobes, 2002;Weisheit & Fuller, 2004), domestic violence (see Davis, Taylor, & Furniss, 2001;Krishnan, Hilbert, & VanLeeuwen, 2001;Websdale, 1998;Websdale & Johnson, 1998), community policing (see Jobes, 2002Jobes, , 2003Liederbach & Frank, 2003;O'Shea, 1999;Weisheit, Wells, & Falcone, 1994), and the link between social capital, noneconomic institutions, and crime (see Lee, 2005;Lee & Bartkowski, 2004). Nonetheless, studies of rural crime make up a small part of criminological research.…”

Liquor Law Enforcement: policy and practice in Australia

“…It was hypothesized, that, in view of the extant literature, the results would show that operational police of®cers were more likely to enforce breaches of the liquor laws by individual drinkers rather than vendors or licensees, and that the lack of enforcement was related to police knowledge of the liquor laws. In addition, because rural communities are smalle r and often have greater police±citizen familiarity and interaction than urban communities (O'Shea, 1999;Wesheit et al, 1995), the study compared rural and urban police of®cers' enforcement behaviour to determine whether location in¯uenced enforcement behaviour. It was hypothesized that there would be less enforcement against vendors and licensees in rural areas.…”

Why do officers support community policing? A cross‐departmental and cross‐temporal comparison

“…By contrast, older officers in Racine, WI, were less supportive of some aspects of community policing (Lewis et al, ). Other samples from rural Alabama, New Mexico, and Turkey found that age had no impact on views of community policing (O'Shea, ; Uluturk et al, ; Winfree et al, ). Taken together, there is contradictory evidence regarding the impact of officer age on support for community policing.…”

“…Relatedly, officer race had no impact on support for community policing in a mid‐sized Midwestern city (Schafer, ) or among supervisors in China (Sun et al, ). By contrast, racial minority officers were more resistant to change in rural Alabama (O'Shea, ) and less supportive of community policing in rural South Carolina (Pelfrey, ). Taken together, evidence regarding the impact of officer race on support for community policing is mixed.…”

“…Yet, a few studies do find that education influences support for community policing. In rural Alabama, officers with higher education were more supportive of community policing (O'Shea, ). By contrast, in both New Mexico (Winfree et al, ) and Indianapolis (Paoline et al, ), more educated officers were less supportive of community policing.…”