Media representations and police officers’ identity work in a specialised police tactical unit

Abstract

A growing body of research has highlighted how media representations of policing and contemporary police work are interconnected and influence each other. An underexplored dimension of this relation is how mediated representations of policing transfer meaning to police officers’ sensemaking of their occupational identities. With the aim of advancing knowledge on this issue, the following article reports a case study of a tactical police unit and explores what roles media representations of the unit play in serving police officers’ narrative ‘identity work’ relative to their work and their organisation. Methodologically, the article draws on an analysis of newspaper articles about the studied police unit and interviews with police officers working within the unit. The findings indicate that positively biased representations depicting the unit as heroic and elite had self-enhancing effects on police officers’ identifications, whilst critically oriented media narratives spurred reframing and projection of local counter-images of occupational work identity. These findings add to the present understanding of how the media affect real-life policing, by highlighting how these representations convey meanings to police practice and occupational identification.