Keywords

The police as an organization can be defined as a state-empowered, civil force meant to enforce the law, and detect and prevent crime and public disorder (Ceccato, 2015b). The police are challenged by the geographical features of many rural regions, as they need to cover large areas that facilitate the offender’s capability to escape and avoid detection. In general, formal rural policing has long been characterized by the isolated and lonesome nature of rural areas and a higher dependency on neighbors and the community in which the police live (Cain, 1973). Traditionally, in many countries there has been a tendency to rely on alternatives to formal policing (Mawby, 2011). In a broader sense, policing can in fact be described as “how the police, the public and other agencies regulate themselves and each other according to the dominant ideals of society” (Mawby & Yarwood, 2011, p. 1). As such, it is not necessarily the police themselves that are doing police work in practice, but other actors, including voluntary organizations and civil society who embrace the work of ensuring community safety.

The police’s work and organization are and always have been different in urban and rural areas (Furuhagen, 2009). Yet, research on policing has largely focused on urban areas and been driven by a “metropolitan criminology,” especially in the Global North (Carrington et al., 2015). Additionally, other parts of the criminal justice system also have their own unique relationship with the countryside, such as the largely rural prison industry in the United States and different effects of legislation. In this section, we report on the experience of rural police as “enforcers of the law” and through policing as the “softer approach to upholding public order”.

The Organization of Rural Police

Ceccato (2015b) describes two accepted schools of policing: the Anglo-Saxon tradition, which involves community-based and civil forms of policing, often by unarmed guards and constables; and the continental tradition, which is more linked to armed forces and authoritarian forms of control. The Anglo-Saxon school has evolved in the United Kingdom and the United States, while the continental school originated in France and is also used in Germany, Italy, and other parts of southern Europe. Over time, the focus of police control has shifted, as in the rural provinces of Canada where, previously, the police acted more upon public disorder and controlling “dangerous classes” than on serious crime, but later this changed due to increases in violent crime (Lin, 2007).

In the past decades, police agencies have involved local citizens in policing: a practice sometimes referred to as “civilianization” (Crank, 1989; Weisheit et al., 1995). This model of policing has been controversial as some feel it undermines the police structure, but in rural areas the practice is believed to strengthen the close-knit bond between the community and the police (Crank, 1989). Lately, the concept of cooperation and building relationships between local agents and the police to tackle crime and fear of crime (i.e., community policing) has increased in popularity after being established in several countries (e.g., Ceccato, 2015b; Takahashi, 2016).

The geographical locations of police stations are still of central importance for today’s police work, which involves online access to services, face-to-face community engagement, and coordination with third-party actors, such as voluntary organizations and civil society. Stassen and Ceccato (2021) investigated the access to and role of police stations in Sweden to find that traditional police stations play a key role, particularly in the most sparsely populated areas of the country. They also found that as the number of stations decreases, it becomes even more important for the remaining service points to be strategically located, so as to be able to carry out the needed support.

Rural Policing

Rural policing is expected to be different from urban policing because, for example, “officers in these agencies typically know the citizens personally, have frequent face-to-face contact with them, and engage in a variety of problem-solving activities that fall outside of law enforcement” (Weisheit et al., 1994, p. 549). This can harness the social control efforts of the partnered organizations and groups, thus aligning them with the efforts of the official crime control agencies (Yarwood, 2014). Examining rural policing is therefore an important endeavor as it can reveal more about rural society (Mawby & Yarwood, 2011), as exemplified below.

Payne et al. (2005), for instance, summarized research on rural law enforcement in the United States, and came to three major findings regarding policing styles in small towns. First, crime prevention and service activities tend to be prioritized by rural police, while urban police focus more on arrests and enforcement of the law. Rural policing has generally been less about life and death decisions and more about “balancing the challenges of remoteness, isolation and a lack of nearby back-up with community expectation and problem solving” (Wooff, 2015). Second, rural police are expected to carry out other tasks compared to urban police, due to the remoteness or lack of social services in rural areas. Third, rural policing includes more informal work (such as counselling families, helping file for welfare, and driving elderly persons to buy groceries) and providing non-compensated services to the community (Weisheit et al., 1995). However, according to Kaylen and Pridemore (2015), one in four rural residents also fail to report more serious events like violent victimization to the police, despite the injury being so serious that the victim needed medical attention. Reasons for underreporting have been discussed in chapter 2.

Differences in social media practices between urban and rural police have been investigated by, for example, Ceccato et al. (2021) who assessed the content of Tweets from official and personal accounts in urban and rural contexts in Sweden to identify potential urban-rural differences. Overall, official rural accounts generated less engagement than the personal rural accounts, which Tweeted less frequently but generated more engagement. Rural personal account holders tend to be “enthusiasts” (eldsjälar) who attract followers and reactions, such as likes and Retweets. These active officers are the ones dominating the local discourse and feeding the “crime talk,” and are possibly the key faces of community policing.

Challenges for Policing in Rural Areas

One challenge lies in the fact that rural police districts often cover large areas, which makes it harder to police efficiently (Barclay & Donnermeyer, 2002; Ceccato, 2015a). Furthermore, over time, police presence has lessened in rural areas of, for example, the United Kingdom and Sweden, and it has increasingly become more centralized (Ceccato, 2016; Lindström, 2015). This, coupled with budget constraints and public pressure for more visible policing, may explain the increase in rural community policing and alternative policing (Yarwood, 2015; Yarwood & Edwards, 1995).

Community policing may take the form of neighborhood watch schemes (Shernock, 1986; Yarwood & Edwards, 1995), safety audits or night patrols. However, Yarwood (2015) discusses how such community initiatives can create problems, as it is often the local elite of rural communities that engage in policing and the exclusion of unwanted groups, criminal or not. Here we must differentiate between “demands to reduce crime and demands to exclude activities or people that are threatening to the elite rural ideal” (Mawby & Yarwood, 2011).

Given the emerging drug problems in rural Sweden, the police organizations in some remote rural areas are under-dimensioned. According to Stenbacka (2021), the police may fail to structure their work in a fruitful way, which in turn affects the working context and conditions of several other professions involved in related work, affecting indirectly vulnerable groups.

The policing of marginalized groups is also reported in different rural contexts. For example, influxes of Latin American immigrants into rural areas of the United States have entailed policing challenges, as language barriers and preconceived notions inhibit communication with and trust in the police (Culver, 2004). Taylor et al. (2015) showed that the perceptions of police fairness and police efficiency depend partially on racial and spatial factors. In the United States, white residents in rural counties perceived significantly higher police fairness than non-white residents in both urban and non-urban areas. The policing of indigenous peoples living in rural areas has historically involved oppression and subjugation (Behrendt et al., 2016; Cunneen, 2016; Cunneen, 2020; Griffiths, 2019; Jones et al., 2016; Yarwood, 2007), especially in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States, which has led to continued distrust and tension between law enforcement and residents. For example, Ruddell et al. (2014) found that remote and inaccessible aboriginal villages in Canada had several times higher crime rates and per capita costs of policing than the country’s average.

The Rural Criminal Justice System

Rural experiences of the criminal justice system vary greatly: from, for example, the rates of prosecution and sentencing, to the spatial distribution of police institutions, courts, and correctional facilities. This subject has been examined within a range of different contexts (see, e.g., Austin, 1981; Bond-Maupin & Maupin, 1998; Campbell et al., 2014; Ferrazzi & Krupa, 2018; Romero, 2020; Steiner, 2005; Zaller et al., 2016). For example, the effects of legislation on the policing of rural youth have been found to be of limited success due to the situational contexts of rural regions, including geography, underdeveloped infrastructure, and restricted resources (Ricciardelli et al., 2017; Wright, 1997). Certain types of legislation also exacerbate the disproportionate targeting of minorities living in rural areas, such as Latin American immigrants in the rural United States (Gómez Cervantes et al., 2018). Legislation has also been devised to defend traditional, rural notions of culture and space, targeting “travelers” and environmental and animal rights activists (Parker, 1999).

The prison industry is a topic of research that has largely been studied in the United States, although exceptions include Meek (2006) who focused on British, incarcerated, rural youth and their experiences, and the study by Baloch (2013) on female prisoners in Pakistan, where rural inmates were found to be more vulnerable within the justice system. However, with over two million incarcerated people, the United States has the largest prison population in the world, both in absolute numbers and per capita, and it disproportionately consists of marginalized groups: people of color, the poor, and the mentally ill (Perdue, 2018). Previously prisoners were largely held in urban areas, but during the 1990s, prisons were rapidly built outside of cities. Governing authorities in rural areas have introduced rural prison as financially beneficial, but rural county constituents have also historically objected, due to fears of decreasing land values and increasing crime rates (Daniel, 1991). Evidence shows that while rural prison development may potentially boost economies through increased job opportunities and tax revenue for those local communities, they may also exacerbate poverty and exclusion of certain community members, such as marginalized ethnic groups (Bonds, 2009). Furthermore, recent research carried out by Perdue (2018) describes how prison counties have been found to have higher poverty rates and lower per capita income than non-prison counties.