Drawing on a completed qualitative research project that explored professional learning in the police force, this paper addresses how enactments of professional police knowledge vary among and across urban and rural localities in Scotland. Globally, policing is a highly standardised and regulated profession. In Scotland, all police officers are trained at a centralised police college where they learn the law, how to enforce it, and codes of professional practice. Models of best practice for police work taught at the College are often derived from large urban environments, and as a result are ineffective or unworkable for police in rural communities. Rural policing knowledge draws upon the reconfiguration and recoding of these urban-based practices as well as other knowledge strategies such as community relationships and local resources. Thus, becoming proficient in local professional knowledges involves unlearning as much it does negotiating and incorporating new practices. Most difficult, police officers must learn to balance a variety of knowledge sources and standards that shift according to particular community expectations and local resources.