Chapter 11 - Police, rural policing, and community safety

• One reason this chapter is devoted to rural policing is the difference in policework and organization. More than 40 years ago, Cain (1973) highlighted the distinctivenessof rural policing, with its isolating and lonesome nature, and thedependence on one’s neighbors and community within which the police lived.Rural crime issues are very different nowadays from those in the 1970s, and certainlyrurality is a complex mix that imposes new demands on policing that gobeyond issues of remoteness and isolation. Policing is no longer a job for thepublic police force only. Yet “(t)here has always been, and still is, a differencebetween police work and organization in urban and rural areas” (Furuhagen,2009, p. 13)Mawby (2011) suggests that in many countries only a small proportion ofpolicing is carried out by police officers especially trained by the central or localgovernment. Alternative policing has not emerged at pace with this change orevenly distributed across or within countries. This chapter starts with an internationaloverview of what the police have been, with particular focus on thehistorical development of the rural police as an institution. This is an importantsubject, as Mawby and Yarwood (2011, p. 1) suggest “studies of rural policinghave fallen off the edge of many research agendas.” This chapter also provides adetailed history of the development of policing in Swedish rural areas and discussesexamples of the contemporary daily work of police with crime, crime prevention,and community safety, focusing on Sweden. Then, the chapter ends with a discussion of future challenges for policing in the Swedish countryside, asthe commodification of policing has become a reality and the police organizationis being centralized.

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