Law enforcement misconduct and crime includes a wide range of behaviours committed by sworn law enforcement officers who are given the general powers of arrest at the time these offenses are committed. Anecdotes, journalistic accounts, government-sponsored commissions and scholarship demonstrate that police officers commit various forms of misconduct and crime including murder, assault, larceny/theft, drug trafficking, predatory sex offenses and driving whilst intoxicated.

Other forms of law enforcement misconduct more specifically involve corruption, whereby police use their power and position to facilitate the operation of organized crime networks involved in the distribution of illegal goods and/or services (see Stinson et al, 2016).

The major problem in the study of law enforcement misconduct and police crime has been the lack of official data on these phenomena: governments generally do not collect or disseminate statistics concerning the prevalence or character of cases of law enforcement misconduct and crime. Furthermore, most of what is known describes the criminal and/ or corrupt conduct of police who work in large urban places rather than rural jurisdictions.

Very little is known about the issue of rural law enforcement misconduct and crime. However, policing scholars have long recognized that police officers behave differently across community types, and some literature identifies factors that distinguish the work of rural police: (i) small police agencies are more concerned with crime prevention and service than large agencies; (ii) rural police are expected to perform a wider variety of tasks because these communities lack other social services resources; and (iii) police– community relations in rural jurisdictions are more personal and informal, mainly owing to dense relationship networks wherein citizens are more likely to know police on a personal level (see Liederbach and Frank, 2003; Weisheit et al, 2006).

Law enforcement misconduct occurring within rural jurisdictions is likely a function of the same place characteristics and culture that promote a unique style of rural policing as well as a unique opportunity structure for the perpetration of police misconduct and crime. Scholarship has identified some problems that seem to be more prevalent amongst officers working within rural jurisdictions that may contribute to law enforcement misconduct in rural places.