“…2,501–5,000 residents), and those with more sworn officers on staff had departments with a pandemic-specific policy to aid in their police response. Consistently, rural police departments experienced a shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) due to limited financial capabilities (Gibbs, 2021; Helfers and Nhan, 2022; Mrozla, 2022). Historically, rural law enforcement and social services agencies have been underfunded, understaffed, and often neglected (Hansen and Lory, 2020), and how these conditions interacted with the pandemic is worthy of investigation.…”