David N. Falcone

Community Policing in Small Town and Rural America

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.

The small‐town police department

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.

THE COUNTY SHERIFF AS A DISTINCTIVE POLICING MODALITY.

Argues that US county‐level policing is distinct from municipal policing. Examines differences between them in terms of historical, political, geographical, functional, organizational and regional variations. Suggests how research might be focused to explicate these differences. In particular, presents the idea of a militia, a group organized out of and by a community for its own protection. Contrasts this with the professional paramilitary model associated with large municipal departments. Points out that most police agencies are not large or urban. The greater part of the USA is policed by approximately 3,000 county‐level agencies. Proposes the militia model as a template for further research.

America’s conservation police: agencies in transition

Examines the history of US conservation police agencies and notes how changes in social values and recreational activities have increased the demands for the protection of wildlife and other natural resources. This has led to the creation of departments of natural resources (DNRs). DNRs have placed an increasingly heavier burden on conservation police departments and have demanded a wider range of tasks and responsibilities of them. These more general policing tasks have, in turn, cast the formerly law enforcement‐oriented conservation police into a more generalist police‐like posture.

Community characteristics and policing styles in suburban agencies

Recent policing reforms have strongly emphasized the role of community context in determining the form and content of effective policing, along with the traditional influence of organizational structures. Recognizing the increasing suburbanization of US communities, this study examines the empirical support for the underlying contextual and structural premises of these reforms in a sample of midwestern suburban communities. Merging data from a telephone survey of 194 municipal police departments in the five counties of the Chicago metropolitan statistical area with data on communities from other government sources, multiple regression was used to assess the relative importance of community context and organizational structure factors in accounting for differences in departmental policing styles. The findings both support and contradict some basic assumptions of current community‐oriented policing reforms, as well as some of the findings of prior studies. They underline the importance of empirically testing our theoretical assumptions in all types of community settings.

Research on police pursuits: advantages of multiple data collection strategies

Presents an investigation of the perennial problem of collecting valid empirical data on police vehicle pursuits, an organizationally sensitive and often controversial behavior, through a new data collection strategy using police emergency radio transmissions. Analyzes taped vehicle pursuits recorded on the Illinois State Police Emergency Radio Network and codes them for content as a data source on police vehicle pursuits. Compares these radio‐transmission data with more conventional pursuit data collection methods, e.g. administrative/official data, elicited‐pursuit‐reporting‐form data, and officer‐self‐report data. Evaluates these as an alternative or supplemental data window for empirically studying the incidence and content of police vehicle pursuits. While some differences appear, results from emergency‐channel radio transmission data largely converge with earlier findings from more conventional data collections. Divergent findings, which are few, appear to be largely the artifacts of different samplings of pursuits that the different data collection methods yield, rather than a result of differential validity.

Tribal policing on American Indian reservations

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide an empirical examination of the characteristics of Indian reservation police agencies at the start of the twenty‐first century.Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses national data on tribal police agencies from the 2000 Census of State and Local Law Enforcement Agencies and from the 2002 Census of Tribal Justice Agencies (both conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics).Findings – The analysis presented documents both common and distinctive trends in Indian Country policing, and compares tribal police agencies on reservations with non‐Indian police organizations generally.Originality/value – The paper provides an empirical reference point for assessing future changes and developments in this mostly undocumented form of US policing.

POLICING ACADEMIA IN ILLINOIS: THE EVOLUTION OF AN AMERICAN POLICING MODEL

ABSTRACT As a conceptually distinctive model of policing, the modern campus police department is developed against its historical backdrop, as a unique policing modality separate from the hegemonic, law-enforcement oriented, big-city police department, its progenitor. Much like sheriffs agencies and the military police, campus police suffer a reduced status within the American policing paradigm, largely because of their numerous responsibilities perceived as only peripheral to the dominant law enforcement function of the metropolitan police. Nonetheless, campus police have become important members of the growing number of police organizational models within the mosaic of policing agencies in the United States; they are also important stakeholders in the community-oriented policing movement as a result of the socially complex nature of the modern collegiate campus community.

Protective orders in domestic violence cases in a mid‐western county

The study reviewed ninety violations of orders of protections in a Mid‐western county from November 1999 through May 2000. Demographic profiles of offenders and victims, prior criminal histories, severity of prior dispositions, victim/offender relationships, and the nature of current violations and dispositions were examined. The study also examined the relationship between prior criminal charges and current offenses. The results show that there was no relationship between the type of prior charges and the nature of current offense, indicating that the nature of prior offenses does not predict whether a person will commit domestic violence or violate orders of protection. Severity of prior disposition, especially prior prison sentence, did not predict the type of reoffense committed. Some form of court supervision with a jail sentence seemed to be a viable alternative for first‐time domestic violent offenders.

The Missouri State Highway Patrol as a representative model

Using a socio‐historical analytical approach, explains the emergence and evolutionary iterations of the Missouri State Highway Patrol (MSHP) as it developed into a virtual state police organization. The legal history of the MSHP is chronicled, and the cultural opposition to a state police department in Missouri is explained. Despite the show‐me states’ long‐standing opposition to state‐level policing authority, the evolution of the MSHP into a state‐police‐like organization is developed as a model that is representative of numerous other state‐level police organizations across the nation. The evolutionary patterns in the development of the MSHP are foreshadowed by other state‐level police organizations, like the Illinois State Police.