Policing and Media

Public Relations, Simulations and Communications

Murray Lee, Alyce McGovern

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136216787
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines the relationship between police, media and the public and analyses the shifting techniques and technologies through which they communicate. In a critical discussion of contemporary and emerging modes of mediatized police work, Lee and McGovern demonstrate how the police engage with the public through a fluid and quickly expanding assemblage of communications and information technologies.

Policing and Media explores the rationalities that are driving police/media relations and asks; how these relationships differ (or not) from the ways they have operated historically; what new technologies are influencing and being deployed by policing organizations and police public relations professionals and why; how operational policing is shaping and being shaped by new technologies of communication; and what forms of resistance are evident to the manufacture of preferred images of police. The authors suggest that new forms of simulated and hyper real policing using platforms such as social media and reality television are increasingly positioning police organisations as media organisations, and in some cases enabling police to bypass the traditional media altogether. The book is informed by empirical research spanning ten years in this field and includes chapters on journalism and police, policing and social media, policing and reality television, and policing resistances.

It will be of interest to those researching and teaching in the fields of Criminology, Policing and Media, as well as police and media professionals.

Section II

Simulated policing

This section of the book explores three discrete fields of simulated policing drawing on the conceptual framework and policing logics outlined in the preceding chapters. In exploring each of these fields we draw on a range of empirical research projects undertaken by the authors over a ten-year period. While each of these projects focused on police media and public relations in the context of Australian police organizations we also draw on broader research and literature in order to place our examples in an international context.

Chapter 4 explores the ways in which the interface between the police and the media is changing, particularly the changing dynamics of the media release. The information police release to the media (and public) is becoming, perhaps contradictorily, both increasingly controlled and yet more transparent. While the media have access to more information from the police, the mediums through which this information is disseminated have become more sophisticated and targeted.

Chapter 5 discusses the ever more important role of social media in police public relations. In the past four years social media has become a centrepiece of police public relations and is increasingly imploring police organizations to significantly alter the way in which they communicate with the media and the public. The success or failure of the policing of the future may well be predicated on the popularity an organization can achieve on social media.

Chapter 6 explores the emergence and significance of law enforcement reality television. The recent investment in these programmes has not only impacted the viewing habits of consumers, it has also affected the way in which the public have come to understand police activity. Importantly this genre has also provided new opportunities for police organizations to disseminate preferred images of policing to an audience hungry for stories about crime and criminality.

4

Policing the Press Release

Introduction

Today many police organizations are in a position to release information to the media on a continual basis. Technological advancements to communications systems, among other things, have created new opportunities for the police to control the dissemination of crime-related information. Gone are the days of ‘free-to-air’ police radio channels, where emergency services communications were openly accessible to anyone with an (albeit illegal) scanner, criminal, journalist and curious citizen alike. Instead, we have ushered in a new standard, whereby outdated analogue technology has been replaced by encrypted digital systems, restricting access to emergency services radios to all but those with official approval.

This chapter deals largely with the ways in which news about crime and justice is sourced, produced and distributed with regard to the changing media and technological landscape, and increasingly media savvy policing organizations. We begin by exploring the nature of the information police organizations release to the media and the actors involved in this process. We then examine how the media receives such information, paying particular attention to the perceptions of journalists involved in these exchanges. Finally, we discuss the increasingly sophisticated ways in which police are able to produce and frame the information they release to the media. As we will demonstrate, while most of the news about crime, justice and policing we read in the daily newspapers or watch on prime time news begins with the humble press release, this is increasingly being coupled with a complex mix of mediums, platforms and multi-media productions, many of which are managed by the police with the express intention of either making it ‘easier’ for journalists to meet their media imperatives or bypassing journalists altogether.

Policing information

The digital encryption of police, fire and ambulance radios in many jurisdictions has transformed the ways in which journalists are now able to access information about real-time crime incidents.¹ Instead of the traditional practice of journalists monitoring emergency services radios for breaking news and incidents, the current situation in NSW, to take an example, is that ‘approved’ media representatives are now allocated access to a new system of emergency services monitoring, the Police External Agencies Transfer System (PEATS).² On the one hand, systems such as PEATS allow journalists to access significantly more information than would be possible via radio scanners – up to 6,000 incidents a day, much more than any one individual could reasonably keep track of. As the manager of the NSW PMU, who oversees the PEATS system, told us: ‘There’s, like I said 6,000 jobs going across the CAD³ system and the PEATS system every day. So there’s no end to content I guess for media and getting information out to the public’ (NSW Police PR Respondent 3).

On the other hand, this system of information transfer has drawn complaints from journalists sceptical of police motivations in implementing such a system. Of particular concern has been the potential for information to be withheld from journalists, something difficult to achieve over a non-encrypted system. Further, some journalists (e.g. Morri 2010b) have complained that the system provides less detail on individual events, making it more difficult to filter and identify priority news events than was possible in the pre-encrypted police radio era. A number of journalists have even gone so far as to accuse the police of covering up serious crime incidents by using vague or inaccurate descriptors on events logged (Morri 2010a, 2010c; Morri and Jones 2010). In short, journalists with limited resources to sift through the mountains of information delivered by PEATS have argued that the system is information overload, to the benefit of police and detriment of news outlets.

Despite the introduction of new ways in which to impart information to the media, policing organizations still regularly make use of more traditional communications methods in what may be seen as a scattergun approach. This is not to suggest that their processes are chaotic or unmanaged – quite the opposite really. Rather, what we are now seeing is a recognition by police organizations that a range of communications strategies are needed in order to ensure information is received by multiple audiences through different mediums – each audience with different journalistic priorities, interests and practices. One example of a long-established tradition in police communications activities is the broadcast system. These information systems are installed in police media departments, enabling police to notify ‘approved’ journalists and media outlets of events, stories and police press conferences. In NSW the system is called the ‘disseminator’, and police media officers use it around twice a day to notify journalists of key events in the state. While this system may seem superfluous, given the range of other communicative options available to police and journalists, it does allow some insight into what the police may see as priority issues of the day. As one journalist put it:

They have a disseminator which basically is a hotline to every newsroom in Sydney, whether it’s radio, TV, print, anything. They can get on it and with one dissemination they can let you know that there’s been a significant arrest, something’s going on, there’s a fire, there’s a murder, there’s a bridge collapse, there’s something happening, the Commissioner’s going to say something. So they will use that disseminator maybe once or twice a day and failing that we will be in constant contact. It’s a very symbiotic relationship.

(Journalist 6)

Other Australian states, reflecting global trends, are also increasingly moving resources into online information systems. South Australian Police (SAPOL), for example, have transferred much of their media information release systems online. Such systems provide journalists with unique login access to the SAPOL website⁴ where they can source a range of information about cases, press conferences, safety campaigns and the like:

[Our website is] not just a public interface but also a great tool for journalists as well. They have their own separate log in area and when we launched we got everyone – I sent everyone on our usual mailing list, our old-fashioned mailing list, and got them to reapply as such for access to the news website. So we’ve got a database of 200 plus journalists that we regularly deal with across the state and nationally across all the mainstream media outlets and whenever we do a media alert – which is ‘just for information we will be speaking about 11 o’clock in relation to the murder of …’ or ‘for information we will be releasing statistics on this certain time’ for media alerts – they will be alerted and they’ll get an email that’s been updated automatically any time you access any of the stories and press releases as well.

(SA Police PR Respondent 1)

The benefit of newer online systems is that journalists are able to access up-to-date information about crime events while they are out ‘on the road’ via Internet-enabled mobile technologies, such as smartphones and iPads. In this way, the police are not only adapting technologies to their own advantage, but also responding to the demands and imperatives of journalists. The disseminator, PEATS and the police website are just three localized examples of the ways in which the ever-symbiotic but fluid relationship between the police and traditional media are shifting with new modes of communication.

Producing and reproducing the press release

In Chapter 1 we outlined the scope of the growth of police public relations departments generally and police media officers more specifically. There is little doubt that this growth has also impacted upon the ways in which police and journalists interact. Things are much different now from the ‘bad’ (or good, depending on your view) old days of informal meetings at local hotels, where information passed from police working on a case to the journalist eager for a scoop over a beer or two (see, for example, Chappell and Wilson, 1969) – although that is not to suggest these things do not happen, as we will discuss in Chapter 8. However, as the discussion of the PEATS system above indicates, new technologies, reform agendas, police and police public relations professionalization and shifting media and political environments have changed the nature of the relationship. And while the PEATS system or its equivalents may produce a constant stream of information for journalists, the formal press release is still the key method of information delivery used by the police for journalists to initiate most media stories that focus on crime, policing and justice.

Official press releases, delivered these days via email and social media among other mediums, are the bread and butter of police media work. Police media and press offices around the world dedicate a large part of their working time to the press release, which has gone hand in hand with their role of responding to incoming media inquiries. The form and style of press releases has changed over the years and become more formulaic, but it is still one of the simplest ways of communicating crime news to the media and the public. While it could be argued that some police organizations flood the media with such releases, the benefit for journalists is that such releases not only contribute important information for lengthier news articles through the provision of basic factual details that such stories require, but they also provide good pre-packaged filler material for media outlets experiencing ‘slow news days’. It is the latter practice which also signals some potentially worrying trends for the reliance on official police information.

The almost mundane reproduction of police press releases in the mainstream media could be viewed as largely innocuous when seen in isolation. The breadth of such reproductions, however, provides us with a telling picture of just how, and by whom, stories regarding law, order and criminal justice are framed. We have previously demonstrated the scope of this reproduction and (re)presentation in our own research (McGovern and Lee 2010), highlighting the scale of reliance on these official press releases in the daily press. By tracking every police media release distributed by the NSW Police Force over a one-month period, and following the crime stories published in the two key Sydney metropolitan daily newspapers over that same period – The Daily Telegraph and The Sydney Morning Herald – we were able to establish that a large percentage of crime news in these key daily newspapers was simply reproduced, often word for word, from NSW Police Force press releases.

During a one-month monitoring period⁵ by the authors (McGovern and Lee 2010) it was revealed that the NSW Police Media Unit produced an astonishing 260 press releases, an average of 8.5 per day. From our more recent discussions with the NSW PMU we know that some six years later this figure was more like 15 per day. This volume of information provides a glut of potential crime stories for media outlets should they deem them newsworthy. These daily stories also speak to Chibnall’s news value of immediacy – the event must have just occurred and the news must be fresh. Over the monitoring period we found that The Daily Telegraph⁶ and Sunday Telegraph published a total of 119 crime-related articles and The Sydney Morning and Sun Herald a total of 111. For The Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, it was cal...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• Section I Police and media: setting the scene
• Section II Simulated policing
• Section III Policing the police
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Research methods
• Bibliography
• Index