Why changing attitudes are key for a safer countryside

A guest blog from Kate Tudor, Associate Professor in criminology at Durham University and author of National Rural Crime Network report “Rural Crime: Serious Organised and International”:

Britain’s response to rural crime needs to improve and intervening in attitudes will be key to achieving this. Predictably, these attitudinal shifts need to occur among police and policy makers, but to be successful, we also need to change the way both rural residents and rural criminals think.

The co-incidence of desirable commodities, the lack of natural surveillance, difficulties associated with policing vast geographical areas, and the absence of stringent security measures combine to create lucrative criminal opportunities.

Consequently, a variety of offenders are drawn to rural spaces to capitalise on the rich vein of financial prospects present within them, principally because it makes good business sense to do so. Among those who harm rural communities, a range of organised criminals who are simultaneously involved other forms of serious organised crime, seek to supplement their criminal portfolios with revenues derived from the victimisation of our rural populations. That those involved in the lucrative industry of international drug supply continue their involvement in rural crime is testament to its profitability, but also to the widespread perception that this form of criminality remains low risk. As a result, UK rural crime continues to attract a mix of local offenders, home-grown organised criminals and offenders drawn from abroad who service both domestic and overseas markets with the commodities that they steal from us.

The chief focus of our attempts to effect attitudinal shifts, therefore, must be trained on the offenders themselves. We need to intervene in their assessment of rural communities as sites of low-risk and high-reward profit generation. In removing opportunities, we can intervene in the balance of their business decisions and redirect their criminal enterprise elsewhere. We cannot, however, achieve this without examining the views and behaviours or rural residents themselves in the first instance.

They must take reasonable safety precautions in response to the serious nature of the threat they face: keys must be removed from machinery; rural WhatsApp groups need to be joined; and people ought to adopt all of the security measures they can afford. Policing represents an important piece in the rural crime jigsaw, but it cannot operate in isolation.

Nevertheless, it is certain that policing also needs to reassess its thinking around rural crime. This must begin with recognition of the severity and complexity of the threat faced by rural policing teams, so that can be properly resourced to meet this challenge. The introduction of the National Rural Crime Unit undoubtedly represents a step in the right direction, but much more meaningful levels of material and ideological support need to come from central policy makers.

Finally, businesses benefiting from the sale of goods to rural communities must also be made to take responsibility for improving securitisation, so that we can reduce the levels of harm endured by rural communities at the hands of serious and organised criminals.