Pagoda View

Nonsense To Say That Police Shouldn’t Do PR

12 Jun 2008

It is not the duty of the police to manage perceptions of crime. ‘They have no business in this PR racket’. So says Heather Brooke, freedom of information campaigner, commenting in the Times recently on the amount police forces spend on PR. She argues that they should confine their role to law enforcement.

This is utter nonsense. The police have always played a vital role in educating people about crime prevention and PR is one of the most cost effective methods. Ill informed perceptions of crime can be as great a threat to some communities as crime itself.

An Edinburgh newspaper recently ran a story that five houses a day are broken into. Shocking! Except when you work out that this means you are likely to be broken into once every century. And there was no mention of the fact that burglaries in Scotland have fallen by almost half in ten years.

Good police PR can play a vital role in helping people protect themselves from crime and prevent an exaggerated fear of crime, which sadly blights too many areas.

Heather Brookes also says that ‘it is not the business of the police to manage their reputation’. We should be worried about any public body that does not invest in its reputation. It is irresponsible for any public service to allow its reputation to be unreasonably undermined through poorly resourced PR. The costs of rebuilding public trust and confidence are immense in terms of time, money and staff morale.
Thankfully, most police forces are all too aware of this.

Ian Coldwell
ian.coldwell@pagodapr.com