Anyone who remembers The Fast Show will recall Paul Whitehouse’s character Archie, propping up the bar and declaring every job “the hardest game in the world”. Plastering, preaching, ballet – all impossible, apparently. Policing comms may not be the hardest game, but it’s certainly one of the most relentless and rewarding roles in public sector comms.
I’ve done two of the best jobs in it: head of communications for Essex Police, and now head of communications for the Police Federation of England and Wales, representing more than 145,000 officers. One gave me a ringside seat at the daily dramas of a busy force; the other drops me into the national conversation, where politics, public trust and frontline reality collide every single day.
In much of the public sector, comms is still treated as a support act. In policing, that lesson has mostly been learned. Comms now sits in the room where decisions are made, not waiting outside to tidy up the mess. For young professionals, policing offers career pathways into influence and seniority that local government and health still struggle to provide.
And in this world, every part of the toolkit is in constant use. External comms. Internal comms. Campaigns. Social. Content. Take one away and the whole operation judders. Yes, the 2am crisis call, the viral clip and the press pack at HQ are all part of the landscape. But to see policing comms only as firefighting is to miss its real power: campaigning.
Because policing doesn’t just enforce; it persuades. It induces people to come forward as witnesses, encourages perpetrators to seek help, and inspires bright young people to join the job when every headline seems to tell them not to. Recruitment, behaviour change, even the daily micro-moments of street conversations and social posts, all of them are campaigns for consent. Internal comms is just as vital: done badly, it’s wallpaper: done well, it’s a lifeline. Policing can’t function without it.
The new challenges
If the job itself is demanding, the environment makes it brutal. Policing comms once revolved around relationships with local journalists. My predecessors knew the crime reporter and there was an unspoken bargain: they got stories, you got fair coverage. Predictable, if not always comfortable.
That world has long gone. Local newsrooms have hollowed out, beats have vanished, and the daily call to the press office has been replaced by an endless scroll of speculation online. The first version of any story is now written by whoever has a smartphone and Wi-Fi. By the time a journalist rings (if they ring at all) the narrative is already set.
Layer onto that the darker currents of today: social media’s unfiltered brutality; fake news and deepfakes generated by AI at industrial scale; political debate that is sharper, angrier, less informed by reality and more polarised. Policing is often dragged into the culture wars, whether it wants to be or not. None of those trends are easing off; they are accelerating.
The toughest of tests
Even when those storms are filtered through the mainstream press, the damage lingers long after the headlines fade. Add constant demand, tight resources and a public appetite for instant answers, and you’ve got one of the toughest comms jobs anywhere.
This is the terrain policing comms now operates in: a space where you have to be fast, honest and clear, but also calm when the narrative runs away from you. You need to speak in human language, not corporate jargon, while still holding faith with officers under siege. You must show accountability without fuelling outrage. And you do it all knowing that one poorly judged line can ripple across the country in minutes.
The test is legitimacy. And that test is only getting harder. Because this isn’t just about firefighting reputational risk – it’s about holding together the fragile consent policing depends on, in an environment that seems designed to pull it apart. That’s the scale of the challenge. And it’s why police comms isn’t simply demanding work. It’s essential to whether policing can still function at all.
Gareth Nicholson is head of communications and marketing at the Police Federation of England and Wales