For example, large, bureaucratic, and paramilitary sheriffs departments - like those in Los Angeles County and Cook County - are almost indistinguishable from municipal police. In contrast, police in very small communities often have more general duties and personal ties to the people they encounter; these officers will be more "sheriff-like." David N. Falcone and L. Edward Wells, "The County Sheriff as a Distinctive Policing Modality," in Policing Perspectives, ed. Larry K. Gaines and Gary W Cordner (Los Angeles: Roxbury Publishing, 1999), 48-49 and 52.
Robert Reiner, The Blue-Coated worker: A Sociological Study of Police Unionism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 269.