Alexander Charles Rock is Director of Commercial and Operations at Derby Museums, UK. He has published on the history of independent cinema, policing London’s cinemas during World War I and local film censorship. His writing has featured in Post Script and Early Popular Visual Culture.

• Introduction1. "Now it's entertainment, now it's propaganda": The Processes of Cultural Production2. Transparency or Control: The Metropolitan Police Press Bureau 1919-19383. ‘A Reassuring Necessity’: Mediating Images of Law and Order in the Light of the Second World War4. The Police As Producer: Percy Fearnley, The Metropolitan Police Press Bureau, and the Making of The Blue Lamp5. “We should not co-operate”: The Home Office’s Collaborative Production of I Believe in You6. Real Life as the Metropolitan Police Insisted Upon Us Seeing It: Division of Labour and the Collaborative Production of Street Corner, 1950-19537. 'The machine at work': Forensic Filmmaking and The Long Arm, 1951-19568. Conclusion: Further Areas of ResearchBibliographyAnnotated Filmography

Rock has produced a critical reading of the public relations activity of the Metropolitan Police and their film industry collaborations in the twentieth century, foreshadowing issues around press-police relations identified in the Leveson inquiry. His forensic archival work identifies the impact of the first journalist and non-policeman, Percy Fearnley, appointed as the Met’s Public Information Officer in 1945 and the contradictory tensions between committing to transparency and controlling the message. The book makes a strong contribution in developing a nuanced historical narrative that highlights the role of public relations in producing both propaganda and entertainment.