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Keywords

police crime, rural police crime, rural policing, small-town policing

Abstract

Scholarship on police misconduct has almost exclusively focused on urban police working within large cities. This study utilizes media-based data to describe 2,592 arrests for crimes committed by rural and small-town police officers working in non-metropolitan counties across the United States. We compared these cases of police crime to those committed by officers working within more urbanized metropolitan counties. Findings demonstrate: 1) the dispersion of cases of police crime across a continuum of geographic places and types of police agencies including the most rural counties, and 2) significant differences between metropolitan and non-metropolitan cases of police crime including both type of crime and organizational dispositions. The study contributes to the scholarly literature on police misconduct and the study of rural and small-town policing.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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RuralPoliceCrimeR&RDoc.091724.1350.docx (143 kB)
Revised Manuscript

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