Editorial – Cobourg Police Service Press Releases Need to Be Timely to be Effective

Pete Fisher
11 months ago
• Categories: Editorial

Police services small or large are businesses.

They protect and serve but at the core they are a business.

And in that, if you don’t like the service you can shop elsewhere.

Translation meaning, another police department can do the job.

That goes for almost every police service, but obviously smaller ones are much easier to assimilate.

The services locally do a fine job – for the most part.

In any service, in any business you’re going to obviously get the good, the bad and the ugly.

And like any business you hope the good outweighs the bad for the public spotlight.

Over the past month or more Today’s Northumberland has been trying to understand the media policy of the Cobourg Police Service.

Press releases aren’t issued unless that is an enquiry. Or it certainly seems that way.

When the public has come to us asking about a certain incident, we’ve reached out to the media officer at the police service and time after time this has generated a press release.

It is getting extremely frustrating as we don’t work for the police. But if we do we should also be financially rewarded.

One might say “so what’s wrong with that?”

A few things.

The police service shouldn’t rely on a enquiry from the press to issue a release. They should be on top of it and issuing daily releases of the great work officers do each and every day.

Secondly the service has a communications coordinator.

If they didn’t it could possibly be looked over, but isn’t that the job of a communications coordinator to give timely releases to assure the public.

And lastly, any media enquiry shouldn’t be a press release.

Today’s Northumberland doesn’t work for other media as other media doesn’t work for us.

The same would apply if another media outlet asked for information. We would certainly not want that to generate a release. The information should strictly be given to the media outlet that asked.

Yesterday there was a robbery at Pioneer gas bar on Division Street.

Numerous people reached out to us. As it should be, we reached out to the police service. Nothing was issued until this morning. A day after.

People’s concerns should be alleviated as quickly as possible.

Peterborough Police were/are also involved in the investigation.

Releasing information a day later regarding a robbery with another service involved fails the community they serve.

A person was arrested a short time later. That would have put to rest any discomfort citizens had.

Sharing information in a timely manner is something the service is vastly missing.