Framing fantasies: public police recruiting videos and representations of women

Public police in countries around the world have faced criticism over a lack of diversity in their membership. This has led to various police recruitment efforts aimed at boosting the diversity of officers. In this paper, we examine public police attempts to recruit new and diverse police members in the social media age. Drawing from feminist criminologies of policing and the media to analyse public police YouTube recruitment videos in Canada, we investigate how women in particular are represented in this visual content. We focus on three forms of framing that appear in these visual communications: expert, ordinary and mythical. We argue that diversity is portrayed in ways that contradict and distract from the continuing history of sexism, sexual harassment and racism in public policing. In the discussion, we assess what our findings mean for literatures on public police recruitment and police image management.