ERMeCC Lunch Seminar

Whether you’d like to share your questions and comments or just listen in over lunch, please feel free to join the zoom meeting on May 11th.

Can the Pandemic Turn the Oil Tanker?: Risk Communications and Policing During COVID-19

Sarah Young

On the surface, the idea of “pandemic communication” for law enforcement may seem to entail the communication practices police engage in to ensure public safety during a pandemic (e.g., communication explaining curfews and maintenance of the 1.5 meter distance.) In this sense, pandemic communications could be defined as communication to manage the risk and crisis of a pandemic to minimize consequences of the health emergency. However, with more nuanced attention, communicating during a pandemic for police is more than just providing public health and emergency management communication. For instance, in the case of law enforcement in the UK and the Netherlands, police representatives still have more mundane communication practices which have to be altered due to the pandemic to mitigate their own personal risks of the crisis. This is especially illustrated through a review of interviews with law enforcement associates both in the UK and the Netherlands in a time period of June through December 2020 during the first nine months of COVID-19.

Based on a thematic analysis of twenty-nine passages related to the pandemic in the context of an official’s use of technology, I argue that there is a range of what should be considered “pandemic communications,” and it is important to consider this range, especially at this time, because the pandemic begins to emerge not just as a state of exception for some communication practices but it also provides the appearance of punctuated equilibrium for organizational change. While only the future can provide more certainty, I argue that the results of this analysis support that while some alterations to communication practices will revert to their pre-pandemic ways, other communication forms have altered an “oil tanker” of an agency that typically lives in legacy and resists change. This is useful for researchers of business and technical communication, crisis and risk, as well as organizational change and justice studies because this case illustrates what is required of organizational communication during a pandemic for law enforcement and the pandemic’s potential for radical change.