Police Crisis Communication Research

Along with "Yang Jia's cop-killing case", "6 police officers beating a young man to death in Hei Long jiang province" and "Hide and Seek in Yun Nan province" happened these years, and depending on the fast media communication, the police crisis management becomes a hot issue more in the public perceptual field than a rational one the government concerns before. Due to its particular nature and function as a national law-enforcement department, all police behaviors especially responses to crisis are sure to be focused by both the public and the media. Whether the strategy adopted to deal with crisis is scientific directly decides the effect of crisis management, even influencing the whole image of the government.This paper analyzes the whole process of crisis management of Yang Jia's cop-killing case and another similar case happened in London in which a police officer shooting a Brazilian by mistake, comparing the experiences and lessons drawn from the 2 cases. On base of theories of communication studies, crisis management studies, public administration and relevant research findings, this paper points out the problems existing in police crisis management as follows: lack of information release system to ensure the public's rights to know; inflexibility of crisis communication mechanism; concealing, lack, delaying and failure of crisis information communication; absence of media communication during crisis recovery; inadequate information feed-back between the police and the public; etc. The reasons causing the problems above are: absence of correct crisis communication awareness; unreasonable information communication mechanism at present and unreasonable establishment of institution; imperfect inner operation system; lack of experiences to handle crisis; media factors such as commercialization trend, personal qualities of journalists and being used by criminals. In the end, this paper gives some advice on how to conduct police crisis communication to maintain a positive image of the police force. On the part of police crisis communication mechanism, we need to change crisis communication concepts, to establish perfect crisis communication system and reasonable regular organization; to rationalize relationships among inner institutions and to maintain good public relations. On the part of communication strategy, this paper puts forward some new ideas such as electing "opinion leader" and optimizing agenda-setting to repair image of police force, as well as mentioning some basic points in government communication such as quick and active release, taking your own tale; sticking to one story and satisfying basic needs. Due to the lack of particular research on police crisis management in domestic academic circles at present, this paper is instructive and meaningful to those studies on Chinese police crisis communication.