Policing the Media is an investigation into one of the paradoxes of the mass-mediated age. Issues, events, and people that we "see" most on our television screens are often those that we understand the least. David Perlmutter examined this issue as it relates to one of the most frequently portrayed groups of people on television: police officers. Policing the Media is a report on the ethnography of a police department, derived from the author′s experience riding on patrol with officers and joining the department as a reserve policeman. Drawing upon interviews, personal observations, and the author′s black-and-white photographs of cops and the "clients," Perlmutter describes the lives and philosophies of street patrol officers. He finds that cops hold ambiguous attitudes toward their television comrades, for much of TV copland is fantastic and preposterous. Even those programs that boast gritty realism little resemble actual police work. Moreover, the officers perceive that the public′s attitudes toward law enforcement and crime are directly (and largely nefariously) influenced by mass media. This in turn, he suggests, influences the way that they themselves behave and "perform" on the street, and that unreal and surreal expectations of them are propagated by television cop shows. This cycle of perceptual influence may itself profoundly impact the contemporary criminal justice system, on the street, in the courts, and in the hearts and minds of ordinary people.

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.

Focusing on the interplay between policing realities, public perception and media reflections, this text provides an accessible account of the relationship between policing and the media.

This book addresses conceptual and practical issues pertinent to the creation and realization of social media strategies within law enforcement agencies. The book provides readers with practical methods, frameworks, and structures for understanding social media discourses within the operational remit of police forces and first responders in communities and areas of concern. This title - bridging the gap in social media and policing literature - explores and explains the role social media can play as a communication, investigation, and direct engagement tool. It is authored by a rich mix of global contributors from across the landscape of academia, policing and experts in government policy and private industry. Presents an applied look into social media strategies within law enforcement; Explores the latest developments in social media as it relates to community policing and cultural intelligence; Includes contributions and case studies from global leaders in academia, industry, and government.

This book illustrates the process by which social media and related changes in communication formats have affected the public face of policing and police work in Canada. Schneider argues that police use of social media has altered institutional public police practices in a manner that is consistent with the logic of social media platforms.

"Twenty years ago, when The Politics of Force was first published, the issue of police brutality was rarely covered in the news. This book was inspired by events following the Los Angeles Police Department's brutal treatment of Rodney King, a Black motorist whose beating by LAPD officers was captured from the balcony of a nearby resident, George Holliday, who happened to have a video camera (this, of course, was in the era before digital phones). First aired by a local television station, scenes from that videotape were shown repeatedly on national news outlets for weeks, giving rise to an unprecedented public reaction. "When George Holliday's video surfaced," one Black journalist observed, "it signaled to a lot of citizens just how bad police violence visited upon marginalized communities actually was" (Smith 2015). The officers' subsequent trial and acquittal, and the uprising in Los Angeles that followed, kept the issues of race and policing in the news for many weeks. That tumult was eventually replaced by relative silence on the issue, occasionally punctuated by news coverage of other violent police-citizen encounters, such as the brutal NYPD assault on Haitian immigrant Abner Louima in 1997 and the death of Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo in 1999, hit with 19 bullets fired by NYPD officers. But as is the case with other policy problems not championed by elites, coverage of police brutality was limited, sporadic, and largely tied to the occasional incident that became a major news story. Then, in the summer of 2014, 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Though what exactly lead up to Brown's death may have been unclear, the aftermath was captured on a bystander' cell phone video. It showed Brown's body left uncovered and unattended, face-down in the street, while neighbors grew agitated and police seemed to mill casually about. Suddenly, the issue again became national news. Brown's death and the intense social media activity and protest it evoked within and beyond Ferguson prompted another, more prolonged and more searing national argument about police brutality"--

This book is the essential guide for understanding how state power and politics are contested and exercised on social media. It brings together contributions by social media scholars who explore the connection of social media with revolutions, uprising, protests, power and counter-power, hacktivism, the state, policing and surveillance. It shows how collective action and state power are related and conflict as two dialectical sides of social media power, and how power and counter-power are distributed in this dialectic. Theoretically focused and empirically rigorous research considers the two-sided contradictory nature of power in relation to social media and politics. Chapters cover social media in the context of phenomena such as contemporary revolutions in Egypt and other countries, populism 2.0, anti-austerity protests, the fascist movement in Greece's crisis, Anonymous and police surveillance.

In today's society, the public perception of crime has been skewed by how the media depicts it. People use the media for enjoyment, companionship, surveillance, and interpretation. The problem is that it becomes hard to separate fact from entertainment. This raises several questions. How are we consuming media? Are we consuming reality within the news? And are we consuming harmless pleasure from entertainment media? In Crime, Media, and Reality: Examining Mixed Messages about Crime and Justice in Popular Media, Venessa Garcia and Samantha Garcia Arkerson focus predominantly on the social constructions of crime and justice and how we absorb them. They look at the influence of crime news and true crime television series that prevent the public from understanding pure entertainment from the realities of crime and justice. They bring to light the social science knowledge missed by media "infotainment," which has blurred the line between information and entertainment. Throughout, all different forms of media are discussed, news media, crime dramas and true crime television series. In doing so, they keep all of its fascinating coverage while uncovering the reality of crime and justice. This book adds significant information to the constructs held by the general public by placing media depictions into historical, legal, and social context.

Since its initial publication, Policing Desire has proved to be an unparalleled analysis of 'the cacophony of voices which sounds through every institution of our society on the subject of AIDS.' For the third edition Simon Watney has provided a new preface, a compelling new concluding essay, and a resource directory for AIDS information.

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.