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.