ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a detailed history of the development of policing in Swedish rural areas and discusses examples of the contemporary daily work of police with crime, crime prevention, and community safety, focusing on Sweden. The way rural areas are policed nowadays is a result of different traditions in policing. There are two accepted police traditions: one that follows the Anglo-Saxon model and the other is the continental police tradition. As in other Western countries, in Sweden the police have undergone several transformations during the start of the twenty first century. The two most important changes are the pluralization of actors exercising policing and commodification of certain services and activities, with the expansion of private sector to traditional police roles. Crime prevention groups have been the main coordinators of community policing in Sweden since the mid-1990s. The chapter discusses the expansion of the private security sector within the governance of safety in rural areas.
