Guest editorial: Rural policing in contemporary society

Citation

Meško, G. and Bowden, M.J. (2024), "Guest editorial: Rural policing in contemporary society", Policing: An International Journal, Vol. 47 No. 3, pp. 337-339. https://doi.org/10.1108/PIJPSM-06-2024-205

Policing has generally developed and has been reshaped in the past decades due to broader factors such as economic and social transformation, changing politics, advancing technology, organizational factors, crime patterns, civil disorder and other issues. Police organizations differ globally and regionally, and modalities of policing vary in different urban and rural settings. Changes in policing organizations and practice have also been related to so-called democratic policing where policing plays a vital role in state, regional and local governance and controlling safety and security problems. Society changed during the COVID-19 pandemic, and more than two years of governmental restrictions to curb the COVID-19 pandemic, while broadly adhered to by most, were not well received by others. Some police measures, especially maintaining public disorder during protests against these governmental measures, may have precipitated a loss of trust in the police and governments in some contexts.

Historically, scholars have explored numerous perspectives on policing and police organizations. The majority of police and policing research has focused on different modalities of policing, mainly in urban areas, densely populated and transnational policing due to the growing activities of organized crime, migration and cross-border criminal activities related to the internationalization of businesses within the development of globalization of the market economy. Recent advancements in evidence-based policing, hi-tech policing, intelligence-led policing, community (oriented) policing and other modalities of modern policing are primarily related to the urban context. There are also discussions regarding the end of “people-friendly” community policing and introducing a more reactive, technologically supported policing focusing mainly on legality and less on the legitimacy of policing. The difference between the urban and rural perspectives also opens questions about governance in general, as the police are the most visible representatives of the government, be it state or local. From this perspective, policing is an integral part of local governance – providing people with constitutional rights to safety and security and the expected high-quality services for victims of crime, public disorder and all kinds of uncertainties and fears, especially fear of crime.

The development of policing differs in various parts of the world. Recently, we have observed the development of rural policing strategies in some countries (e.g. the USA, UK, Australia and Canada, the so-called “big four”) and the establishment of specialized rural police forces to deal with rural crime and disorder in rural settings, as well as protection of nature by broadening police tasks to include green criminology perspectives because many crimes against the environment (air, soil and water) and other living beings occur in rural areas. The development, organizational forms, training for rural policing, human resources, equipment, effectiveness and efficiency differ from country to country. However, the development of rural police forces and advances in rural policing have also influenced research in this field, which is growing worldwide. This special issue and other recent publications stand as testimony to promising developments in studying rural perspectives of formal social control.

Rural policing in contemporary society is a topic that deserves renewed attention due to the growing body of recent research and literature on rural criminology and police studies. As in criminology generally, a body of police and policing research has been growing in the past decades, and it is impossible to ignore the significant contributions of police scholars to the development of criminology and criminal justice studies teaching and research at the universities, enriching police academy curricula, policymaking and practice of contemporary policing. Conducting police and policing research is a learning process and a two-way road where researchers and police officers learn from each other in order to improve police practice and contribute to greater safety and security in general. In the case of rural policing studies, the improvement of rural policing is also a step forward to the professionalization of rural policing and the improvement of the quality of work of rural police forces. Any high-quality research in this field can potentially contribute to such developments, whether critical or supportive.

In this special issue, more than a dozen articles present various contemporary challenges of rural policing and give some starting points for new future research avenues. The richness of theoretical perspectives, methods of research, levels of analysis, applicability and contexts of research presented in the articles prove that rural policing needs to be studied from a global perspective. From the contributions to this special issue, we note rural society’s challenges as a distinct socio-spatiality, including the difficulties of communicating with communities in remote contexts. As already mentioned, contributors point to the crisis of policing during the COVID-19 pandemic, requiring greater practical adaptability as police organizations pivoted to govern a global health emergency within their national territories. This is underscored in those contributions emphasizing how policing in rural contexts continuously adapts to the distinct needs of rural areas and the changing demands of rural citizens.

Articles in this special issue are arranged into two groups. The first group focuses specifically on rural perspectives of policing, and the second on comparative perspectives of specific forms and aspects of policing in different settings: urban, semi-urban/small town and rural. The articles are based on recent research efforts by the authors and utilize a variety of different research methods that witness the richness of rural policing research and geographical comparative analyses on policing. The first article in this issue presents police relationships and engagement with rural citizens in the United Kingdom, Australia and France, followed by an ethnographic study of police culture in a rural Kansas police agency and the experiences of rural police officers in Trinidad and Tobago. These articles are followed by the articles on rural policing in Melanesia and responses to domestic violence, policing in rural schools, police custody in rural Scotland, perception of American farmers of crime, safety and policing, policing the pandemic in rural Pennsylvania and investigation of shadow infrastructure and illicit networks in rural illegal rural enterprise. The second comparative group presents articles on the differences in urban, small town and rural policing during the COVID-19 pandemic in Croatia, intertwined rural and urban policing in the Eastern region of Slovenia, race, local context and traffic stops and rural and non-rural places in Midwest US county, and police legitimacy in urban, suburban and rural settings in Slovenia.

This thematic issue on rural policing contributes to the growing body of research in rural criminology, which has developed well in the past decades. We know that the main challenges of policing remain in the urban areas. Still, we should remember that rural perspectives deserve the attention of researchers, policymakers and police practitioners, as well. Research on rural perspectives is also challenging due to various methodological perspectives, especially small samples of police officers and, in many cases, the pilot nature of the studies. Still, they present critical and diverse perspectives on contemporary rural policing and future research challenges. We hope we meet the expectations of critical readers and researchers who will build upon the research and scholarship in this particular issue.

Our sincere thanks also go to all the authors for their contributions and those reviewers who have helped us to improve the quality of the articles. We hope this special issue will incentivize, encourage and inspire scholars studying rural perspectives in policing, criminal justice and criminology. We are pleased to have assembled in this special issue the contributions of authors from such a diversity of rural contexts, including articles by authors from Australia, Canada, Croatia, Fiji, France, Slovenia, Trinidad and Tobago, the United Kingdom and the United States of America.