The nonenforcement role of police in western Alaska and the eastern Canadian arctic: An analysis of police tasks in remote arctic communities

Abstract

As with those in other geographic locales, police serving Alaska Native villages and Canadian Inuit communities perform a variety of tasks of which law enforcement is only a small part. In these jurisdictions the police fill public safety and community service functions that have more in common with the early period of policing in the west than with contemporary urban policing. The lack of economies of scale requires police officers serving in these remote areas to take a proactive approach and to assume many responsibilities that their urban counterparts would not even consider.