Contact information for journalists and media

Dorset Police's News Office deals with many thousands of media enquiries every year. They provide journalists with interviews and information regarding ongoing incidents, serious crime and policy issues. The team is also responsible for issuing dozens of proactive witness appeals and other news releases each month, to the media and online.

In addition to helping journalists, News Officers provide 24/7 on-call advice to officers, assistance for victims of crime and support to partner agencies.

Media enquiries

Media enquiries are taken by the News Office between 7:30am and 6pm, Monday to Friday. These opening hours are amongst the longest in the country for non-metropolitan forces. Outside these hours, enquiries can be made to the Force Control Centre via 101. Colleagues will assist with routine enquiries if their policing commitments allow. If your out-of-hours enquiry is more complex, urgent and operationally-critical, they will pass it to the on-call News Officer.

The News Office is only able to take enquiries from accredited journalists and other media representatives. We must justify our work and, therefore, we are unfortunately not resourced to assist students, amateur film-makers or any other enquiries that will not result in information being widely published. Your local Neighbourhood Policing Team or the Safer Schools & Communities Team may be able to help.

For more information about how we handle media enquiries - such as what information is released at each stage of an investigation - read our full Media Relations Guidelines.

Requests for statistics

If your enquiry is purely about statistics, you are advised to first research the matter on websites such as www.police.uk and, if the data is not already published, to submit your enquiry to the Freedom of Information team, who are better placed to research statistical information.

The News Office will of course, provide a response to any questions arising from statistics and can advise the best way to frame your enquiry to get a quick response.

Documentaries and features

In addition to operational enquiries, the team is also keen to assist any documentary or feature ideas.

We will generally be able to support such requests when there is a clear operational benefit, they are in the public interest and they would require a proportionate amount of our time. We do not assist with pilot documentaries that are not yet commissioned.

Please speak to us early when you are developing your idea and we should be able to help.

Follow-up enquires to social media posts

We also publish a wealth of information on Social Media. Where this appears on the Force's main accounts - Dorset Police on Facebook and @dorsetpolice on Twitter - we can assist with any follow-up enquiries. However, we do not have the capacity to respond to enquiries about posts on individual officer or team accounts.

For follow-up enquiries on these posts, please make contact using the same social media channel. When setting up a Force social media account, officers and staff agree to respond to any follow-up questions they generate, whether from the media or the public.