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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]