This paper explores the challenging nexus of police custody, risk and intraorganisational boundaries in the context of a recently reformed national police service. Police custody is an often-hidden aspect of policing, away from the public and largely academic scrutiny. Although there is increasing recognition of the importance of rural criminology and policing, there has been little or no focus on rural police custody. This paper begins to address this by focusing on the challenges faced by rural police custody in the context of large-scale organisational change. Drawing on the theoretical framework of Giacomantonio (2014) and more recent considerations of abstract policing Terpstra et al., (2019), this paper offers insights into the ways that police custody in rural Scotland has been organised, against the backdrop of challenging organisational change. I ultimately argue that as policing services in Scotland have become increasingly ‘abstract’ from communities, police custody as a national division has witnessed the impact of this more greatly than other parts of local policing. Custody staff have managed this through a number of organisational adjustments, but ultimately rural police custody requires staff to manage risk in different ways to their urban counterparts.

Rural areas have historically been associated with remoteness and difficult access, which when presented in the context of drug markets, have been described as areas with little drug trafficking. Nonetheless, emerging research is pointing out that remote areas in Scotland are experiencing an unexpectedly high volume of incoming drug parcels. Although we are now starting to learn more about the drug market, there is very little research out there on the factors that have led to such changes in recent years.

In this presentation I will bridge this knowledge gap by discussing how parcels containing illicit substances are policed in mainland and island communities in Scotland. I will be discussing the picture of current drug markets through the perspective of policing of drugs, and thus outline the current practices and narratives that Police Scotland hold in relation to crime in rural areas. I will also be discussing policing challenges and opportunities while providing an answer to questions around the ways in which police interventions shape drug access and drug supply in rural areas of Scotland.

The rise of private security across the globe has sparked concerns that a central public good is being corporatized, and that policing will no longer be guided by the interests of ‘the public'. In this article, we argue that state policing has never been in the interests of ‘the public'. Instead, like all policing actors, the state police create and serve something more finite: ‘a public'. By exploring the ‘publics of policing' we gain important insights into the constitutive role policing plays in producing socio–political communities. We suggest that this represents an important addition to the nodal governance framework, which currently overlooks the importance of what corporate, state and civic actors create when they engage in policing.

This paper explores the problems of police power that are revealed when the police become subjects of gossip. While information is central to police work, there is an essential asymmetry in its use. As symbolic agents of institutional and state power, police officers are able to demand information from the public without themselves being subject to reciprocal scrutiny. However, ownership and control of information is subverted in remote small islands, revealing the inherent vulnerabilities of police power.

Drawing on an ethnography of policing in remote Northern islands in Scotland, this paper explores how the physical and social environment of small island life makes gossip a crucial form of regulating potentially fragile social relations. In this context, police activity has the potential for intolerable reputational damage, putting community order at risk. Yet at the same time, gossip is employed as an informal mode of regulating the threat that the police represent. The police become subjects of gossip not principally in their role as agents of state power, but as residents who live alongside the communities they police and who are consequently swept into the same systems of social control. These complex dynamics reveal the tensions inherent in police/community power relations - and illuminates the potential for communities to hold the police to account.

This paper presents qualitative data from two projects on policing and local partnership working in rural Scotland, with fieldwork carried out in 2021-2.

We understand this through an interdisciplinary synthesis of theoretical concepts - ontological security from sociology and the ‘rural idyll’ from geography. We address an under-discussed and under-theorised aspect of the Covid-19 pandemic – its impacts on risk and ontological security in rural areas in the context of increasingly ‘abstract’ policing and public services and longstanding patterns of rural inequality, deprivation and 'poverty of access', including digital poverty. We consider the implications of this for trust in policing and other public institutions, through the framework of ontological (in)security (Giddens, 1991).

In rural geography, the 'rural idyll' (Cloke, 2003) refers to a hegemonic social construction of 'the countryside' as the verdant locus of a simpler and more wholesome way of life, untouched by 'urban' problems - a pervasive cultural narrative often used to promote life and leisure in rural settings. Although unrealistic, the notion of the 'idyll' still shaped constructions of rurality for rural people and communities, with the encroachment of 'urban' problems and historic neglect by (urban) central government highlighted as threats to the idyll and to rural ways of life, even as the pandemic created specific challenges for rural policing and public services.

In this context, concerns about rural tourism - amid a questionable but pervasive narrative of a boom in domestic holidays - appeared as one focal point for various constructions of risks to the rural idyll. Our findings extend the understanding of the impacts of Covid-19 in rurality and for institutions of order maintenance, highlighting the need for increasingly ‘abstract’ policing and public service to attend to local contexts, particularly amid rurally-contingent inequalities.