ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how rural crime is governed in the UK. It outlines the new architecture of rural crime governance and its associated mentalities and technologies. The chapter argues that despite this new architecture there is considerable space within the rural governance of crime for the presence of a number of different imaginaries or discursive representations of the rural crime problem. Yarwood and Cozens note that senior police managers sometimes deploy this idyllic representation of the countryside as essentially tranquil and crime-free, and cynically this serves the purpose of justifying the very limited allocation of policing resources to some rural areas. A national performance management regime for crime reduction has been in place since 1999, following the launch of the Crime Reduction Strategy and the imposition of a number of Public Service Agreement (PSA) targets and Best Value Performance Indicators.
