Bridging Accountability Gaps: Police Media Units, Journalists, and the Struggle Against Democratic Erosion

The professionalization of police communication has intensified in Western democracies, transforming how police organizations shape their public image and manage accountability. While strategic communication is critical for public institutions, it can also contribute to the erosion of democratic principles by limiting transparency and controlling narratives. This paper investigates the implications of this phenomenon on media coverage and democratic accountability, drawing on two four-month ethnographies conducted within the public information offices of two French national police departments. As a participant observer, I documented the daily interactions between police public information officers (PIOs) and journalists. Building on Lipsky's (2010) theory of street-level bureaucracy, the study highlights the role of PIOs as intermediaries between state institutions and the media. However, Lipsky's static framework does not fully capture the dynamic and contested nature of police-media relations. Adopting an interactionist perspective, this research reveals how journalists navigate and, at times, circumvent police efforts to control information. Despite structural asymmetries favoring police institutions, journalists leverage their informational and symbolic resources to challenge institutional narratives. This ongoing negotiation between journalists and PIOs has significant implications for democratic erosion and resilience. By acting as a counterweight to state control, journalists help to maintain institutional accountability and transparency—key pillars of democracy. However, the precarious nature of these interactions underscores the fragility of this balance. Strategic police communication can undermine the media's watchdog role, reducing opportunities for critical scrutiny and enabling institutional opacity. This study reframes police-media relations as a site of democratic contestation, where struggles over narrative control directly influence public perceptions of state authority and accountability. It extends the street-level bureaucracy framework by incorporating the agency of "clients" (journalists) in contexts where they possess substantial resources to resist state control. Ultimately, the findings underline the indispensable role of legacy media in safeguarding democratic accountability, even amidst growing institutional efforts to centralize and professionalize communication. By situating police-media interactions within the broader context of democratic erosion, this paper contributes to understanding how political communication practices can either mitigate or exacerbate challenges to democratic governance. It calls for renewed attention to the strategies through which journalists can uphold their role as democratic safeguards in the face of increasingly sophisticated state communication tactics.