Peculiarities and challenges of media and police cooperation

The cooperation between media and police leads the public to receive the information about criminal events in the country, learns about police reforms and other important events related to police work. The relationship between the media and the police in today's Lithuania is very little examined and analyzed. Taking all of that into account, it was decided to examine the statements of police representatives to the media and journalists to discuss, from personal experience, the cooperation between the two institutions represented by the subjects. Therefore the object of article is the relationship of media and police cooperation. The purpose of the article is to analyze the aspects of media and police cooperation. Objectives of the research are: to reveal the basic information publishing principles of the media; to discuss the main legal acts regulating police cooperation with the media; assessing the attitudes of police spokespersons and journalists towards the aspects of mutual cooperation, to reveal the peculiarities and the challenges of it. The cooperation between the media and the police is assessed as good enough, but there is a clear mutual criticism, which indicates that there are difficulties in their cooperation. Problems arise when police spokespersons avoid providing information to journalists and journalists obsessively demand this information. It is proposed to solve the problems by fostering mutual respect and goodwill, realizing each other's needs. The fact that the information provided by police officers to journalists is distorted is not obvious, but noticeable. This discrepancy in real information stems from gaps in police-media cooperation, with police officers refraining from providing detailed information on a specific crime and journalists lacking the information provided and relying on unconfirmed data. However, according to spokespersons of the police, cooperation with the media brings more benefits to the police than harm. According to them, the improvement of the image of the police is related to the information published in the media, which forms a positive image of the police.