Policing in small town America: Dogs, drunks, disorder, and dysfunction

A handful of researchers examined the activities of law enforcement in rural areas. Much of the research on rural policing activities involved well-constructed ethnographic methodologies including observational studies, case studies, and in-depth interviews. These studies demonstrated that rural police officers faced a number of problems that their urban counterparts did not. Building on this past research, this article reports the results of a content analysis of law enforcement activity in one rural community over a two-year timeframe. In all, 948 police calls as described in one community's published media crime reports were analyzed. Results of the analysis suggested that rural policing requires officers who are trained as generalists and able to respond to an assortment of departmental and social/community needs. Implications are provided.     

Do career criminals exist in rural America?

The criminal career paradigm had essentially ignored investigating offenders in rural areas. To fill this void, a retrospective, cross-sectional design sampled 331 former adult correctional clients from the case archives in a rural midwestern state. Self-report and official records indicated that rural criminal careers were characterized by relatively few arrests, short-lived criminal justice system involvements, and a paucity of violent crime. Although the sample demonstrated relatively benign criminality overall, the most chronic offenders, top 10 percent of the sample, were plagued by overlapping, contemporaneous problems such as alcoholism, substance abuse, mental health difficulties, early onset of antisocial behavior, low educational attainment, and revolving involvement in the criminal justice system. Like rural communities, which were characterized by exceedingly low crime rates, rural career offenders tended to be relatively harmless criminals especially compared to habitual offenders commonly found in the criminological literature.     

Paradox of voting under an urn model: The effect of homogeneity

We propose a simple Pólya-variety urn model for calculating paradox-of-voting probabilities. The model contains a homogeneity parameter, and for specific values of this parameter the model reduces to cases previously discussed in the literature. We derive a Dirichlet family of distributions for describing the assignment of preference profiles in large committees, and we show how the homogeneity parameter relates to measures of similarity among voters, suggested in prior studies.     

Mission impossible in Cyprus? Legitimate return to the partnership state revisited

Cyprus has been divided for far longer than it has been united. There have been many attempts to reconcile conflicting parties but without remarkable success. The two communities – Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots – see the solution to the “Cyprus problem” in opposite terms. Although recent public opinion surveys have concluded that the most preferred option for the Turkish Cypriots would be “independence of the TRNC” and “reunification of the country”, for the Greek Cypriots, there is much less information about the legitimacy of these competing regimes and their respective claims. This paper seeks to fill this gap by identifying different legitimacy sources and their effect on the course of conflict settlement. Somewhat paradoxically it appears that those most strongly identifying themselves with the Republic of Cyprus, and approving the regime legitimacy of the Greek Cypriot government, are actually for status quo and not for the reunification of the country which makes the return to the partnership state mission impossible.     

Breaking new ground: Afghanistan's response to landmines and unexploded ordnance

Operating since the late 1980s, in an environment of shifting wars, the Humanitarian Mine Action ( HMA ) programme in Afghanistan has nonetheless been highly successful in reducing the impact of landmines. This article discusses three factors that have contributed to its success: the building of national capacity; the systematic application of surveys; and the ability to act flexibly and innovatively. Having operated under the auspices of the UN, but in the absence of a functioning government, the programme faces new challenges with the potential transition to peace in Afghanistan. Ultimately, however, the programme is a world leader in its field, and as one of the best functioning sectors in economic and humanitarian assistance to the country, it represents a key resource for a new internationally recognised Afghan government.     

Introducing Human Mandible Identification [(hu)MANid]: A Free,Web‐Based GUI to Classify Human Mandibles

Statistical programs have revolutionized the way in which forensic anthropologists conduct casework by allowing practitioners to use computationally complex analytics at the click of a button. Importantly, the products of these statistical programs are reproducible and contain measures of error or uncertainty, thereby strengthening conclusions. This paper is an introduction to (hu)MANid, a free, web‐based application that uses linear and mixture discriminant function analyses to classify human mandibles into one of many worldwide and/or periodic reference groups. The mechanics, development, and use of the application will be discussed. Further, the program was tested against other software to compare model performances and classifications. Total correct classifications among the test cases and programs were identical. Ten mandibles were tested using both statistical procedures. Mixture discriminant analysis improved classification by an average of 9.3% and correctly identified three more mandibles than LDA. Therefore, we believe (hu)MANid will be an asset to the anthropological community.