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This paper explores the challenging nexus of police custody, risk and intra-organisational boundaries in the context of a recently reformed national police service. Police custody is an often-hidden aspect of policing, away from the public gaze and scrutiny. Although there is increasing recognition of the importance of rural policing (e.g. Harkness (2020); Mawby and Yarwood (2011); Ruddell and Jones (2020); Yarwood and Wooff (2016)), there has been little or no focus on rural police custody. This paper seeks to begin to redress this by focussing on the challenges faced by rural police custody in the context of large-scale organisational change.

This paper draws on data from a study funded by the Scottish Institute for Policing Research (2016–2018), entitled “Measuring Risk and Efficiency in Police Custody in Scotland”. The paper adopts a qualitative methodology to develop an understanding of the varying nature of police custody across Scotland. Two contrasting case study locations were selected, one urban and one rural. 12 semi-structured interviews and 15 hours of observation were carried out. Data was transcribed, coded and analysed and thematic analysis enabled themes to be developed. This paper draws on the data from the rural custody suite.

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 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. Intra-organisational management around staffing has led to complex management of risk, illustrating some of the challenges of national organisational change on police custody.

This paper focuses on the impact of large scale organisational change on rural police custody and intra-organisational relationships and dynamics. Rural policing is still a largely neglected area of study and rural police custody is even less understood. This paper therefore provides an original contribution by focusing on this under-researched area of policing. It also illustrates complexity around risk, staffing and management of people being held in rural police custody suites. It is therefore of value to policing scholars in other contexts, as well as rural criminology more generally. It has applicability to international contexts where macro level policing reform is occurring.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how police authority – in its “soft” form – is used and understood by staff and detainees in police custody in England, examining how these meanings are shaped by this unique police setting. It is argued that the nature of this setting, as fraught and uncertain, along with the large volume of citizens who come into contact with the police therein, makes police custody the ultimate “teachable moment”.

The present paper is based on in-depth qualitative data collected between March 2014 and May 2015 in four custody suites (in four forces). In each site, the researchers spent three to four weeks observing and then interviewed 10-15 staff (largely police officers, detention officers but also a few other criminal justice practitioners) and 10-15 detainees. In total, the paper is based on 532 hours of observing and 97 interviews (47 with staff and 50 with detainees).

One way that the staff used their authority in the custody suites in the research was softly and innocuously; this entailed for example staff communicating in a respectful manner with detainees, such as by being deliberately polite. The authors conclude that this “soft” power was a dynamic, processual matter, shaped in particular by the physical conditions of the suite, the uncertain and insecure nature of detainees’ circumstances, as well as by the sense of disempowerment they felt as a result of being deprived of their liberty and autonomy, all of which contributed to police custody being the ultimate “teachable moment”.

The paper draws on a range of qualitative data collected from both staff and detainees in four types of police custody suites as part the “good” police custody study. It therefore makes an original contribution to the field which has tended to rely on cross-sectional surveys of citizens not policed populations (Harkin, 2015; Worden and Mclean, 2017).