‘All it takes is one TV show to ruin it’: a police perspective on police-media relations in the era of expanding prime time crime markets

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

In this article, we draw on interviews conducted with Canadian police investigators for a study of mass media representations of police work to better understand their unique perspectives on the nature of police-media relations. In contrast to the orthodox position of the policing literature that holds that police are the dominant partner in the police-media relationship, investigators interviewed felt that they had lost control over representations of their work in media stories. This loss of control is attributed, in large part, to the pressure placed on reporters to feed an insatiable public appetite for crime-related stories. Particularly, worrying for investigators is the belief that they are no longer able to maintain secrecy over their investigative activities and techniques – a shift that they see as having a significant negative impact on their work. What is required, officers believe, is better collaborative means of working with news media outlets.