As the five-day Indian Police Service(IPS) Vertical Interaction Program concluded on Saturday at Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow, IPS officials from various parts of the state sitting in the class room number ?4? of IIM expressed their desire to know, ?How can they project their ?Indian Police? brand better, like the corporate world does?? On the last day of the program, group of IPS officials were given chance to interact with Sandipan Deb, Editor of the Financial Express. While Deb advised officials on some finer points of ?media management?; officials in turn suggested ways to make media sensitive to the problems of Indian Police force.
Fed up with discussing deteriorating police image for last five days and keeping in view the IIT as well as IIM background of Sandipan Deb, one of the officials asked, ?We(police) are in the business of saving three things that are dear to everyone i.e. life, property and self respect. So please suggest us that how can we project our brand in a better way like the corporate world does?? As an answer to this question, officials were told about ?Incident management? as well as ?individual management? while they communicate with the media.
?Unless it is a matter of national security, you should give away as many facts as you can to the media otherwise there are chances of garbled stuff being published. One can make intelligent use of short messaging service to keep the journalists informed in short time? suggested Deb. On the other hand, IPS officials has some suggestions for sensitising media as well and some suggested that those looking after ?crime beat’ should be trained and sensitised towards police force and mechanism. ?Like other countries, we believe that the person looking after crime beats in Indian Newspapers should also be trained first about working of the Indian police force,? said Santosh Mehra of Andhra Pradesh Cadre.
Officials were also suggested to conduct media workshops, so that the media can get an inside into the services from the officials themselves. At the end, most of the IPS officials felt that it is high time that they include ‘media management’ among other set of duties. Talking to the Indian Express, SK Jain of Manipur cadre expressed his thoughts and said ?Ignoring media was an old school of thought and we have grown away from it. Today we believe that like other things, it is also important for an officer to learn ?media management? so that they can make constructive use of it.?
