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Historically, police have used broadcast media as a means of directly communicating with the public: to apprehend alleged criminals, ensure public safety and build trust for the police force itself.
But what happens when police get behind the camera, produce their own media, tweet and make videos for news bulletins?
We take it for granted that when we watch the news we’re watching something that’s been produced by the network that’s airing it. Often we’re not.
‘They’re certainly generating their own content, not only in terms of traditional kinds of press releases—sometimes up to 20 a day on different stories from the media unit,’ he says.
‘But police organisations now are increasingly having their multimedia unit. They have the capacity to go out and shoot footage of crime scenes, of crime events to edit those in-house and to send those finished edited, essentially news pieces, off to the nightly news, or indeed put them on their YouTube site or their website.’
‘As they’re putting together more and more cameras on different angles and police will be wearing cameras themselves, there’s cameras on Tasers, there’s cameras on cars. The capacity to edit this material together into a story becomes more and more, so you not only have your police cameraman out there with the camera but you’ve got all these other sources of data as well.’
As police film, edit and distribute their own material they’re reaching a much wider audience through more diverse channels. Associate Professor Lee is concerned that audiences may not always be aware of how this material has been created.
‘We’re seeing what they want us to see and, what worries me about that more than anything else, is that I don’t think as a public, as communities we really know that this is going on,’ he says. ‘We take it for granted that when we watch the news we’re watching something that’s been produced by the network that’s airing it. Often we’re not.’
‘There was a time when the videos that they might have produced, they might have been evidentiary kind of videos. Now we’re talking about polished videos that can easily sit next to other stories on the seven o’clock news.'
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Like many organisations, the police are also using social media in an attempt to have more direct conversations with communities, sometimes bypassing traditional media altogether.
‘Having a look around the world at what police organisations did with social media, they all did very different things. It was all very experimental. There was no kind of “this is the way we’re going to use this technology”. It came into play quite differently in different places,’ says Professor Lee.
‘We saw New York Police Department recently ask for images of officers—it was going to be a nice friendly “this is what your local officer has been doing”—and people posted up all these images of police abuse and misconduct that they’d seen taking place and had photos of.’
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‘Certainly, as I understand it at least, many of the feeds that go on even in the Australian context; if there’s someone monitoring, they will have a fairly open discussion going on. But often when they step away from it being monitored, where they can wipe something out quite quickly, that might be kind of contrary, they’re likely to close down the capacity for the public to post up’.
While social media and digital technologies open up new possibilities for the police, those same technologies can sometimes also be a double-edged sword.
‘In a sense, what you’ve got is almost an arms build up of digital media going on—that capacity for citizens to be able to film and instantly upload instances of police misconduct, some of which we’ve seen graphic images of over the last couple of years—but at the same time police able to counter in a variety of ways,’ says Professor Lee.
‘If we take the young man being potentially assaulted by police at Mardi Gras a year-and-a-half or so ago, what we saw was very much a release of public footage then of police footage and almost a contest to win over public and media support in relation to that event.’
The Media Report makes sense of our increasingly media-saturated world, talking to key players, examining contemporary journalism and charting the enormous changes of the digital age.