The police’s mediatization and relation to the media within a terror-related context: An in-depth investigation on the police’s perspective through the lens of the Paris attacks

This research examines the police’s mediatization within a terror-related context. As such, theories of mediatization, police-media relations, and police’s new visibility notably are linked and discussed. The focus is put on the Paris attacks which occurred on November, 13th 2015. The police’s perspective is investigated, which implies that French police officers working in Paris and its area were interviewed. Moreover, this research raises questions such as the impact of the police’s mediatization on the police’s position towards the media. The stress is put on 24 hours news channels - BFM TV and iTélé - and Twitter. The study aims to complete the academic field researching the police-media relations, by taking the police’s point of view into account. As scholars formerly qualified the relation linking the police and the media as an unhappy mariage, one goal is to determine whether or not it is still the case, especially within terror circumstances. As such theories of mediatization are applied to the police, together with new visibility theories, it leads to consider the police’s new visibility as a dimension and a consequence of its mediatization. Further, the impact of the new visibility on police officers’ professional and personal plans are addressed, turning out that police officers are rather negatively affected by their new visibility. Since this research investigates on the French police, which presents a particular communication structure and tradition, these dimensions peculiar to the case-study are exposed as well. Thus, the French Police institution appears to be strongly traditionally-rooted and reluctant to an open communication, which hinders its communication modernization. As such, the French police’s uses of Twitter are researched, in order to compare with previous academic findings. This research’s observations support former statements on the police’s uses of this social network site and complete the academic field by exploring the police’s uses of Twitter under a terror-related context. An amount of ten in-depth interviews were conducted. They were audio-recorded and further transcribed verbatim. A thematic analysis was used to interpret the data. It resulted that the police-media relation can still be characterized by an unhappy marriage characteristic within a terror-related context. However it also resulted that police officers were especially harmed by their mediatization through 24 hours news channels, while acknowledging that these channels had specific requirements to meet: images, material, testimonies etc. In sum, journalists are doing their job, which is incompatible with the police profession: real-time information cannot suit to the length and scope of the police’s investigations requiring a lot of time and discretion. The mistakes that BFM TV and iTélé made on the RAID assault of the Hyper Kosher supermarket in January 2015 (cf. Charlie Hebdo) were also pointed out since these television channels provided intelligence on the police’s strategy and revealed the presence of hidden hostages on the site of terror attacks; which explains the police’s position towards 24 hours news channels. Overall, the unhappy marriage characteristic of the police-media relation is supported by this research which also brings new elements related to the context of terrorism and terrorist threat.