Rolling hills, endless plains and lonely roads: the many factors of place and space that make up rurality and remoteness inevitably influence many of the crimes experienced. But if there’s one thing Professor Joe Donnermeyer, adjunct of the UNE Centre for Rural Criminology, has learnt over his long career, it’s that there is much more to rural crime than meets the eye.
An accidental career
Originally a city kid from Cincinnati, Joe Donnermeyer, a sociology graduate who “couldn’t tell a soybean from corn”, and had never taken a criminology course, would soon become an early and eminent academic in rural criminology.
Stock image of Cincinnati
Professor Donnermeyer is one of the expert judges for the Rural Crime and Law Photo Competition.
Joe first became interested in rural crime studies after arriving at the agricultural-based Purdue University in the 1970s – where he was one of only a few staff members in his department with a non-farming background. Soon after transferring to The Ohio State University, Joe won his first big grant money for a farm crime study. The grant was awarded by the National Institute of Justice, one of only three successful applications of 105 hopefuls, because it was work that had never been done before.
Joe quickly found the general understanding of what constituted rural crime at the time was very underdeveloped.
“When I moved to Ohio State University and was beginning to do crime prevention and research work, we focused on farm crime and residential burglary and the things we traditionally think about. We started a series that [former UNE criminologist] Elaine Barclay picked up on and rewrote for Australia, called the Home and Farm Security Series.”
Things snowballed as more people joined the field and created networks. Though he attempted to pursue alternative avenues for scholarship, they never quite developed, and so rural crime scholarship became for Joe “the Pitbull that wouldn’t let go of my leg”.
From humble beginnings, he’s witnessed the development and transformation of the field.
From Ohio to Armidale
Joe began to regularly travel to the University of New England in the 1990s, originally to collaborate with Elaine Barclay, one of the very few rural criminologists in the world at the time.
Joe’s trips to the Armidale region and beyond expanded his understanding of space and place and its impact on rural crime, influencing his scholarship in rural criminology around the similarities and differences experienced in rural crime around the world.
“I can still remember when Elaine and I interviewed a farmer in an area where the average size of a farm is about 50,000 acres, whereas in Ohio the average farm size is 500-700 acres. We asked the farmer about his fuel being stolen and we asked him where his tanks were located and he said, ‘about 10km down the road at the airstrip’,” he says.
“That kind of physical ecology would be unheard of in Ohio. Specific things like the physical environment are the context in which crimes occur, but it varies greatly. One universal truth in farm crime is that the closer a farm is to a public highway, no matter its size, no matter the terrain, the more vulnerable it will be to most kinds of crime. That’s true of Ohio and NSW.
“But beyond that, the issues of vulnerability of a place really boil down to its sociological features: What is its history and its culture?”
For Ohio today, Joe says the biggest rural crime issues are not farm crimes, but what are generally considered more urban crimes: drug use – opioids and heroin, and organised crime associated with them, as well as family violence.
“Rural criminologists like myself are spending a lot of time interpreting what’s going on in some of these newer kinds of things you would not think about as being so problematic in rural areas. The rates of crimes like drugs and violence are likely higher in rural than in urban in areas in Ohio. So we continuously try to redefine what the image of rural crime and rural communities is,” he says.
Stock image of Purdue University
Small town culture and rural crime
Historically, Joe says, theories of criminology say crime goes up when communities change and become disorganised, and those theories were applied to rural communities without much question about their usefulness for rural settings. But rural criminologists – now in about 35 countries around the world – have been building more fit-for-purpose theories that show rural crime does not happen through disorganisation, but through its own systems of organisation.
The crimes are more often than not aided by a place’s culture and social organisation, rather than its topography.
“For example there are intricate systems and networks leading to and from local dealers in rural towns, including in Ohio, that allow drug crimes to flourish. Similarly, family violence is often facilitated by normative structures of family patriarchy – where the values and systems are centred around the belief that men are in charge and can do what they like,” Joe says.
“So most of rural criminology is going to be place-based; you have to stop looking at national police statistics and get out in the field to understand what is happening there.”
In his corner of the world, there are a few specific things Joe would like to see happen to reduce rural crime.
Disrupting rural crime
“I hope some Americans listen to this: we need tight gun control. Our gun culture is directly linked to our culture of violence no matter who’s the victim and who’s the offender, but especially when it comes to interpersonal violence. That would make a huge, huge difference,” he says.
“But we also need something else when it comes to substance use because there are always locals involved in these international and national networks for trafficking. We need communities willing to put a stop to these trafficking rings, and the local people who are dealing, and not worry about what their status is within the local community.”
Wherever you are in the world, he says the interconnectedness of rural communities can “enable and facilitate” crime.
“I remember an interview with a law enforcement officer out north and to the west of Armidale who was reluctant to investigate a crime reported on a farm for two reasons: the farm owner wasn’t local, and the suspected neighbour’s wife was on the shire council. We see that in the United States, maybe even more than you see it in Australia, because our law enforcement is organised at the local level.”
Improving policies and resources
However, attitudes to rural crime at the community level and law enforcement are changing for the better. Joe has been able to map out the development of the field through the influential book he has edited, The Routledge International Handbook of Rural Criminology. But there are still some changes he’d like to see.
“I think it needs to be recognised that rural areas require more investment in safety and security infrastructure. It needs to be, per capita, probably higher than in urban in order to be effective because of the distances and isolation of many rural communities, and the impact of crime which can be much greater in smaller places.
“I think as rural criminology grows, it will be able to better inform criminal justice policy and strategising so that will help with the reallocation of services out there in different regions and different countries of the world.”
Though geographical realities may set communities apart as distinct dots on a map, Joe says the connectedness of the field of rural criminology – and the ability to digitally bridge the gap through instant communication with other rural criminologists in countries all over the world – is what keeps the field evolving.
And that constantly evolving and developing scholarship is what keeps that Pitbull yapping at Joe’s heels.
Professor Joe Donnermeyer is a Professor Emeritus/Academy Professor in the School of Environment and Natural Resources at The Ohio State University, and an adjunct professor at both the Research Center on Violence at West Virginia University and the Centre for Rural Criminology, University of New England, Australia. He is the author/co-author of over 100 peer reviewed publications related to rural crime and rural societies.
Professor Donnermeyer is one of the expert judges for the Rural Crime and Law Photo Competition.
