There are two things which frustrate me about police media

The first one I can understand, and that is that they only report on details of a small minority of things which the police deal with each day. They probably have some very good reasons for not reporting on a lot of their activities, and I fully accept that, none-the-less, it still annoys me that a lot of newsworthy stories never see the light of day as a result.

The second one I really can’t get my head around, and that is the general ignoring of regional areas. With occasional exceptions, New South Wales police media in particular, tend to ignore stories outside of metropolitan and coastal areas, and the few areas in between such as the highways. There’s a great example this week.

Here in Deniliquin there was a home invasion on Monday. The local police media rep has obviously talked to the local media about it as the local radio news had the details this morning, so I’d expect the next edition of the local paper on Friday to also have the details, however the main New South Wales Police Media office in Sydney has not said a word about it. It’s funny in a way that if there was a home invasion in Sydney, it would be front page news and be leading TV and radio news bulletins all day, but a home invasion out here in Deniliquin, whilst it should receive some coverage in national news bulletins, has received no coverage outside of the local area due to the fact that the Police Media unit in Sydney couldn’t be bothered to report the story.

It’s not the first time, and it won’t be the last, but it bothers me that the police media unit shows such little regard for the regional areas. I don’t understand why they don’t seem to care about areas outside the urban fringe, and I can’t wrap my head around it no matter what angle I attack it from. Perhaps they suffer from the same problem which many regional people see in the New South Wales government, that in many cases, the government treats areas outside Sydney as being second-class citizens.

Samuel