Contact information for journalists and media

Dorset Police's Media Office deals with many thousands of media enquiries every year. It provides 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, Media Officers provide 24/7 on-call advice to officers, assistance for victims of crime and support to partner agencies.

Media enquiries

Please be aware that we log all media contact on a secure database, comprising the name and contact details of the enquirer, the questions asked and replies given. This is done for auditing and legally required disclosure purposes.

Media enquiries are taken by the Media Office between 7.30am and 5.30pm, Monday to Friday. Outside these hours, enquiries can be made to the Force Command 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 media officer.

The Media 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 may be 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 Media 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.