"The Lions and the Lion Tamers": The Geopolitical Complexities of Rural Police-Community Relationships

• In Event: Investigations Into Police-Community Relations Across Landscapes

Abstract

Law enforcement’s relationship with communities continues to be a topic of concern in criminal justice and law and society. However, our understandings of these relations in the rural domain continue to be under-examined. Existing rural literature only scratches the surface of rural policing and police relations with their local community. In this paper, we examine how rurality impacts and influences policing behaviors while also examining how rural community members interact with and perceive their local law enforcement. We specifically seek to answer two questions: (1) How do rural community members make sense of policing as a practice and institution? (2) In what ways does rurality influence the nature of police-community relations? Using data from a year-long ethnographic project based in a rural, western U.S. community, we use a focused coding analytic approach to analyze 47 semi-structured interviews. Our analysis demonstrates how the small town, intimate setting heavily influences rural policing culture and the ways law enforcement practices are carried out. We also find that negative interactions between law enforcement and the community significantly weakens this relationship and injures communal perceptions, attitudes toward police, and highly valuable social capital in the rural context.

Authors

• Amy M. Magnus, California State University, Chico

• Patricia Advincula, San Jose State University

• Frank Donohue, University of Maryland, College Park

• Josephine Martinez, University of California, Irvine