Managing Police Relationships: Affinities Between Police Researchers and Crime Journalists

• In Event: POL Panel 1. Police-academic Partnerships

Abstract

Criminological scholarship in the fields of crime reporting and police-media relations is reasonably well-developed. Yet, despite a number of studies over the decades examining the practices of crime reporters and their management of police source relationships, scholars have not paid much attention to the congruities between researchers and reporters.

During several years of fieldwork researching crime reporting, police communications and police-media relations, I observed how policing researchers––particularly police ethnographers––and crime reporters shared many methods, values and objectives.

For example, both seek to cultivate relationships with informational sources within policing, using both formal and informal channels. Both provide some types of police sources with confidentiality. Both wish, in their own ways, to describe the ‘policing world’.

A notable affinity between police ethnographers and crime reporters is the often-precarious nature of their relationships with police sources and police forces.

This paper explores personal observations and analyses of these affinities based on nearly a decade of research on police-media relations in England and Ireland. It describes common tactics and methods in developing source networks, and strategies for managing source relationships of different kinds.

The paper also interrogates the frailties in scholar/journalist relationships with policing, particularly attempts to balance access-management with professional integrity and the intellectual and ethical need to criticise and challenge policing. In this regard, the paper also examines the sanctity of confidential source protection, common to both journalists and scholars, and some of the legal challenges that face both professions.

Author

• Cian O Concubhair, Maynooth University