Policing small town Canada : a comparison between Alberta and Nova Scotia

This thesis explores community based policing (CBP) in small towns and rural communities in Alberta and Nova Scotia. This thesis explores the meaning of particular concepts that are commonly employed in the implementation of CBP, particularly in the small town and rural setting. In order to assess the attitudes of the police officers who are expected to put CBP into practice, a mail- back survey was prepared and delivered to 256 RCMP and municipal police officers in two primarily rural areas of Alberta and Nova Scotia. An analysis was done on the 131 respondents who returned a completed survey, giving a reasonable completion rate of 52%. The main finding is that most police officers tended to share similar attitudes about CBP and endorse the official ideology, which the idea has been institutionalized in these geographically separate areas. Overall, the officers adopt a relatively narrow definition of the role of the community in policing. The community was to be involved in crime prevention, in identifying crime problems, and as an exterior booster, but issues of accountability, funding, training, and discipline were largely to remain police prerogatives. In only a limited sense could it be claimed that, in the view of officers, the "community are the police". The degree of general consensus is highlighted by the absence of Statistically significant differences between officers of the two provinces, and between other key independent variables, such as age and education, as well as where the sample distribution was skewed more, such as rank, gender, and type of policing agency (RCMP or municipal).