Many police communications teams have developed an arms-length approach in dealing with the media. They have defined limited support for media queries through a service level statement, with many simply ignoring media requests.
That is tending to lead to the force themself writing the narrative for a particular news item, often providing some information on a “no further queries will be allowed” basis.
This is a naïve approach as media channels have a role to report on crimes, support the police with crime reduction or engagement with the public to help solve crimes, and occasional to bring the force to account, in the right way, when they have got things wrong.
This is part of a bigger picture of media channels being labelled as toxic, and strategy of interrupting more casual interaction between officer and media channel.
The aim should be to rebalance the relationship to something more useful for all.
This is a useful reference Society of editors and police media relations
