AS A young detective sergeant working for Hove CID one of my daily duties was to brief the press.

Each morning at 10.30am the local crime reporter from The Argus, sometimes accompanied by a reporter from BBC Radio Brighton (as it then was) and a ‘stringer’ journalist from one of the press agencies, would come into the old front office at Holland Road Police Station.

By going through the crime sheet and incident book for the previous 24 hours I would brief the local journalists on what had been happening in the town.

Everything from theft of milk from the doorstep to violent robberies would be covered, and I would never quite know what might find its way into the paper.

I once briefly mentioned that a well-known cricket umpire’s car had suffered minor damage in a collision while parked at the County Ground.

‘Dicky Bird misses death by inches’ was the front-page headline the following day.

Journalists and police officers had a working relationship, based on mutual respect and a shared understanding that each of us had a job to do.

We took turns buying the coffee and went to each other’s office Christmas parties.

We even – shock horror – shared gossip over a pint in the local ‘police’ pub from time to time.

Now the police simply issue a bulletin of incidents which this week’s revelations in The Argus show cover barely 10 per cent of all reported crime, and missing out some of the most serious cases (rapes, robberies and assaults on police) altogether.

The Argus reported that 787 crimes were committed in a fortnight in Brighton and Hove with the public being told about two of them at that time.

Liaising with the press has become the job of a professional communications department, turning out turgid press releases that then run the risk of being recycled into equally turgid news reports.

The press and the police need each other.

Many crimes have been solved thanks to coverage in newspapers, and equally many of the great Argus stories over the years have only been possible because of information supplied by police officers to the reporter.

Under pressure from Hacked Off – or ‘Famous People for Censorship’ as it perhaps more accurately should be known – the Filkin Report into relationships between the press and police ludicrously recommended that all meetings between journalists and police should be recorded, and that police officers should be accompanied by a communications officer at all times.

The inquiry into allegations that some journalists at the Mirror and Sun listened to voicemails lost all sense of proportion when it turned into the biggest and most expensive single criminal investigation in the history of the Metropolitan Police.

Experienced detectives were removed from investigations into murder, rape and organised crime in order to conduct dawn raids on reporters.

The British Police arrested more journalists over the last three years than in Zimbabwe. Many were kept on bail for up to two years, and over 95 per cent of the cases resulted in no prosecution, collapsed trials or not guilty verdicts.

At times the extent of the investigation, and the continuation of prosecutions even though it was clear that juries were very reluctant to convict journalists of criminal charges in these circumstances, suggested that there was a snobbish determination by the political and legal establishment to wreak revenge on the scurrilous tabloid press.

Good community police officers have always built relationships with local councillors, vicars, business owners and youth leaders. That stakeholder management (as the modern police service now calls it) should include the journalists covering the patch as well.

In an over reaction to the Leveson Enquiry the police have mistakenly retreated into a bunker of secrecy and borderline paranoia where all news must be managed.

Police officers, even whistleblowers, fear disciplinary action if they talk to a journalist.

This is self-defeating for the police themselves.

In a time of cuts to police budgets the service should be taking every opportunity to tell the public, through the local media, all the work they do. The Sussex public need a free, vibrant, independent, probing and yes sometimes irreverent local press. At least 200 local papers have closed in the last decade.

This makes it harder for us as a society to keep local councils, police and health services on their toes, and it is creating an environment where poor service and even corruption can become routine.

We are lucky to still have an active print media here in Brighton and Hove. Local police officers should be encouraged to talk to the journalists who call those in public service to account, and take the opportunity tell us all about the good job they do under intense pressure.