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The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between voluntary and involuntary turnover and officers’ salaries.

Using data from the 2013 Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics survey, Poisson regression was used to test hypotheses about the effect of pay and other economic incentives on turnover, while controlling for previously identified influential organizational and community factors, such as crime, community disorganization, geographic region, policing philosophy, collective bargaining, the utilization of body-worn cameras, and workforce diversity.

Higher salaries were significantly associated with lower voluntary and involuntary turnover rates. In addition, other economic incentives and participation in a defined benefits retirement plan were related to voluntary separations but not dismissals. Consistent with prior research, southern agencies and sheriff’s departments reported higher turnover rates than local police agencies and departments operating in other areas of the USA. The effects of workforce diversity were mixed, while collective bargaining was associated with lower rates of voluntary turnover, and the utilization of body-worn cameras was associated with higher rates.

In addition to contributing to the theoretical literature on antecedents of turnover, this research has practical implications by helping law enforcement officials estimate how changes in the compensation structure affect their ability to retain qualified personnel. Due to the complexities of modern law enforcement, maintaining a strong and stable workforce is becoming a greater challenge, and more research is needed to understand which incentives are crucial in recruiting and retaining the most effective policing personnel.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the experiences of policewomen to determine the extent to which female officers face resistance and obstacles to police work, to examine the coping mechanisms female officers utilized to overcome impediments encountered, and to establish common themes in female officers' success stories of acceptance and integration.

Owing to the difficulty in accessing female officers, the current research utilizes in‐depth qualitative interviews through snowball sampling. This methodology provided a rich sample of tenured female officers' experiences to explore resistance and integration.

The findings suggest despite early occupational experiences of sexual harassment, discrimination, and disrespect, after long tenures, female officers do achieve acceptance in police work. Female officers are holding high civil service ranks in police agencies and achieving new “firsts” every day, including breaking into stereotypically masculine assignments.

As police departments nationwide are having difficulties maintaining recruitment standards and full rosters, the current study can provide insight into the obstacles women face when joining police agencies and methods to alleviate these impediments, revealing an under‐recruited population for police agencies nationwide.

This study extends past literature by: examining female officers' experiences in a variety of agencies previously ignored in the literature; analyzing the tenure of the officers' careers to determine the onset and desistance of female officers' experiences with resistance and acceptance; and suggesting women do survive and, in some instances, thrive in an “all boys club.”

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.