Procedural justice and simulated policing: the medium and the message

Abstract

Police organizations are increasingly utilizing social media and other forms of new communications technologies to communicate with the public in diverse and innovative ways. We have argued elsewhere that such communications constitute a new form of what O'Malley has referred to as “simulated policing”. Based on research interviews with police public relations professionals and an online survey of the public, this paper considers the relationship between procedural justice, new communication technologies, and the police–media–public intersection.

Keywords:

• police and media
• police observational documentaries
• procedural justice
• simulated policing

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Rodger Watson, Hadeel Al-Alosi, Tracey Barnett, Lucy Burke, Hitoishi Chakma, Susanne Ech, Francesca Ferguson-Cross, Tannory Islam, Wener Li, Xicong (Sunny) Ma, Conor McKeown, Kathleen Morris, Yves-Christopher Pincemin, Kemal Salic, Ananya Srivastava, Zhi Tian, and Ammar Topolovic for their contributions to research that informed this paper. Thank you to Gail Mason who offered feedback on an earlier version of the paper and the anonymous referees who gave extremely constructive feedback.

Notes on contributors

Murray Lee is Associate Professor of Criminology at the University of Sydney.

Alyce McGovern is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the University of New South Wales.

Notes

1. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Australia's publicly funded national broadcaster.

2. The first a completely separate project, the other three conducted simultaneously as part of one overall project.

3. Such categories are somewhat arbitrary as many actions we term non-operational may in fact support or be an expected element of operational policing. Nonetheless, for our purpose here, the split is useful.

4. In this paper we draw on only a small component of the overall survey results.

5. Combining responses relating to viewership of police-based observational documentaries in question 12.

6. These findings were backed up by tests of robustness—both Welch (p=0.000) and Brown-Forsythe (p=0.000)—which reinforce the finding of a relationship between the means of our variables.