Force to sell: policing the image and manufacturing public confidence.

In recent years, policing organisations have become increasingly savvy at producing positive images of police work through both the old and new media via the growth in professionalised police public relations (PR) infrastructure. This image work comes as a response to a number of modern policing and political challenges such as the public fear of crime, a range of police reform agendas, the perceived crisis in policing consent and the withering of ‘old media’ such as newspapers and a proliferation of new media, social media and citizen journalism. With a growing body of international research pointing to the need for policing organisations to foster public confidence and organisational legitimacy through the practice of procedural and distributive justice, much less research has looked at public confidence in the context of police media work. Based on original qualitative data,1 which includes interviews with key uniformed and civilian directors of PR branches in Australian police organisations, this article constitutes a comparative case study and explores how media and PR directors within Australian police organisations conceive of the links between their ‘image work’, public confidence in the organisation, trust in policing and legitimacy in the police institution. We investigate both the discourses and practices of public confidence raising amongst a number of elite police PR managers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]