Rural Law Enforcement

Municipal Police Departments

Municipal police departments, the primary law enforcement agency in rural areas, are generally modest in size. (Rural departments often employ fewer than ten sworn officers.) As in urban areas, the specific features of the rural setting influence both the organization and services of municipal police departments.

Unlike urban police departments, rural municipal police departments are much more reliant on ancillary law enforcement bodies in the performance of their duties. Due to their size and budgetary limitations, rural municipal police can provide only limited police services to their citizenry because they lack the resources to [Page 1419]conduct specialized criminal investigations or to create specialized units to address the many challenges associated with serious crime. When confronted with serious crime, rural departments often rely on the expertise of county- and state-level police agencies.

Although rural police have limited investigative capabilities, they provide a wide range of service-oriented tasks to their community. With fewer governmental and social agencies in rural areas, residents are dependent upon local police for a variety of nonpolice services, especially given that the police are often the only agency available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week to deal with their concerns.

Another hallmark of rural police departments is the strong relationship they maintain with their community. Although police administrators and scholars shifted toward a community-oriented model of policing in the final quarter of the twentieth century, rural departments have in many ways always practiced “community policing.” Two components specific to rural areas—limited population and cultural homogeneity—play a strong role in cementing the bond between municipal departments and their citizens. Unlike urban departments, rural departments serve a smaller and generally harmonized citizenry. Serving a small population, rural officers often know all of their community residents. In addition, because rural towns are often culturally uniform, community values and expectations are generally unambiguous and consensual. Therefore, rural officers are able to provide standardized services to a subsection of their community with minimal fear of offending another community group.

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